The 7 Categories of Engineering Management w/ Ian Nowland of Datadog

**LinearB** (0:02)
Hey, you're listening to Dev Interrupted, the podcast made for engineering leaders who want to continuously improve. Today's guest is Ian Nowland, the SVP of Core Engineering at DataDog.
Ian joins us to share his experience coaching engineering managers, and how the reality is different from the books. We get into Ian's seven categories of engineering management, how to take your ego out of your mistakes, and how to measure the impact of your team.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
This episode is sponsored by LinearB. Give your dev team the power to improve with team-based metrics, high-risk code alerts, and the world's first project board based on real-time Git activity.
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**LinearB** (0:46)
Ian, thank you so much for coming on the pod today.

**Ian Nowland** (0:50)
Pleasure to be here.

**LinearB** (0:51)
Awesome. So our topic today is all about engineering management and kind of what it means beyond just reading a book or going to a conference. You know, kind of what happens when you get in the trenches of engineering management is a little bit different than maybe what you've read in a book before.
Okay, so I wanted to start out here and talk about the concept of coaching. Can you talk about some of the realities of coaching as an engineering manager in your experience?

**Ian Nowland** (1:25)
Yeah, I think, so I've been in the industry for 20 years now and 10 of us are the managers. I've seen plenty of managers and how they do it with me and I've sort of done it myself. And I think the biggest thing, like you read about one-on-ones and you read about coaching and there's all these like formal techniques and about asking questions.
And what I've observed in terms of myself and people I've talked to is very few people do it by the book and it's actually completely fine.
So the way I look at management generally is like all these things you read or listen to. If you can find one thing that you can authentically do as yourself, then it's actually the way that it goes. And so what I find with coaching is there's this other aspect of one-on-ones where people say, oh, they shouldn't be tactical. They should be strategic and they should all be about your career.
And it's another one that's actually never been true in my career. Instead, all my one-on-ones have always been to be tactical in terms of solving problems. And that's been upwards with my manager and sort of downwards. And so, and what I find out of that is this movement between maybe advising and listening and then actually formally coaching when you really see them having a problem is actually extremely fluid. Like it's not something where you very deliberately think, I need to coach now. What are my coaching techniques? Instead, what you tend to get out of this is like, yeah, open-ended questions are a great way. Not saying what your opinion is, but eliciting in terms of, these are great things to do. But I find almost yet no one does it by the book. Everyone, it's just this very, very subtle shift with the difference being, you know, when people have performance problems and that's where it's, okay, this person for the next month, I'm gonna have this topic in my one-on-one and I've gotta get them through it. But to me, it's actually much more rarer than sort of what you read.

**LinearB** (2:56)
Yeah, I actually really like that you kind of brought up the thought process of those open-ended questions. Because from my experience, that kind of allows the person you're coaching, maybe that's a team leader in your example here, to kind of figure things out on their own.
Are there any general engineering open-ended questions that you try to ask to lead them in a direction?

**Ian Nowland** (3:26)
So my technique, and I don't know where I picked this up from. So I do lots of sideways, one-on-ones.
And what I like to do is, hey, someone else has this opinion, what do you think? So, and when I, you know, people who sort of know me, like it's just because someone tells me something doesn't mean I believe it. I always sort of give that gap. But it's more or less an opening to a conversation.
And I might really believe that person, or I might not. But what it is, is it gives them a non, like they're not conflicting me. They're thinking about what someone else has said and reacting to it. And it really opens up the conversation. Let's just talk about like different perspectives on things. And so I find that that's a great, it's been probably my most successful technique as the intro to these conversations. Very cool, very cool.