M4 Engineering Manager
I employ a robust managerial toolbox to independently lead a team of engineers delivering direct business, and customer impact
Scope
Area of ownership and level of autonomy / ambiguity
- I independently lead my team to deliver business impact through successfully driving results on projects in support of semi-annual/annual goals.
- I am increasingly able to independently identify and tackle projects that solve open-ended, ambiguous problems that are often beyond the scope of my immediate team.
Collaborative Reach
Organizational reach and extent of influence
- I am effective at influencing outcomes across multiple teams and with cross-functional partners, often requiring conflict resolution and managing ambiguity.
- I autonomously guide my team to the sustainable delivery of business impact through my mastery of execution and people management.
Impact Levers
Organizational levers typically exercised to achieve business impact
- I am increasingly able to achieve impact through influence, planning strategically, problem solving and effective decision making.
- I cultivate a healthy environment of growth and support that empowers my teams to consistently deliver at a high level of impact for our business and customers.
🏆 Results
Impact
- I identify new opportunities for my team to execute that have the most customer, org or company-wide impact
- I refocus my team's efforts when results aren’t moving the needle for our business/team goals or serving the needs of customers in a meaningful way
- I know which levers to pull to drive meaningful results and understand the wider, cross-functional implications of my team's work
- I am responsible for ensuring that results do not come at the expense of long term growth, retention, or psychological safety
- My team is delivering results across multiple impactful projects while demonstrating a very high standard of execution
- I suggest and improve how our team measures and communicates customer impact
Ownership
- I have a sense of responsibility and obligation to act on opportunities I see across my org
- I create an environment where my teams can learn from mistakes to drive better business outcomes. I embrace and share the learnings with others
- I unblock myself and my team by assessing, and eliminating barriers focusing on solutions, including implementing process and scale improvements
- I respond with urgency, and drive urgency in my team to operational issues (e.g., SEVs), owning resolution within my sphere of responsibility
- I actively seek out and eliminate sources of toil on my team to reduce the impact of KTLO and SEVs
Decision Making
- I make informed decisions by having productive debate with the right stakeholders, seeking diverse perspectives, balancing details with the big picture, and optimizing for the company
- I am able to leverage insights about our customers to help inform my decisions, balancing the value for the customer with other business goals
- I am able to reach the right decision despite conflicting perspectives and act thoughtfully and decisively
Operational Excellence
- I set team priorities, goals, expectations and key metrics at the right altitude and hold my team accountable for progress against them
- I run efficient processes and operational cadences, leveraging appropriate asynchronous and synchronous methods, to get to the right outcomes
- I ensure that appropriate information is disseminated within the team
- I build healthy partnerships with stakeholders, and teams with whom my teams have long-lived relationships
- I support my team in maintaining their well-being and respect work/life boundaries in line with Dropbox’s virtual work practices
🌟 Direction
Agility
- I am a calming influence on my team in times of change, and uncertainty
- I coach my team to navigate complexity, and ambiguity
Innovation
- I champion bold, and innovative approaches for my team, and lead them to generate solutions that aim to deliver better results
- I set audacious goals for my team, encourage them to take risks, and share lessons learned
- I have a growth mindset and am comfortable enabling the team to experiment, learn and own the outcomes, and sharing what I learned
- I find new and creative ways of leveraging customer insights and including customer voices to influence strategy
Strategy and Change Management
- I communicate company and functional updates and decisions in a way that creates context, understanding, and alignment for my team
- I am increasingly thinking about how my team fits within the broader engineering organization and I make tradeoffs that optimize for the overall organization rather than locally for my team
- I define the strategy for my team in alignment with stakeholders, company-wide priorities, and customer needs
- I define the roadmap to execute on that strategy and inspire my team, and cross-functional stakeholders to work toward that strategy
- I resolve misalignments with stakeholder teams and cross-discipline partners with differing goals
- I am independently planning for and articulating goals over increasingly longer time horizons, even in the face of material ambiguity
- When necessary, I’m able to introduce change into the organization and guide my team accordingly
🌳 Talent
Personal Growth
- I have self-awareness and connect with others with empathy
- I proactively ask for feedback and work on self-development knowing my strengths, and take actions on my development areas
- I drive discussions with my manager about aspirational goals and seek out opportunities to learn, and grow
- I invest time in being a better manager and leader
Team Development
- I foster the career growth of my team members by taking into account their unique skills, strengths, backgrounds and working styles and career goals through coaching, on-the-job experiences, mentoring, and internal mobility. I give opportunities to work on next-level assignments that demonstrate readiness for promotion when appropriate
- I celebrate when a member of my team focuses on reducing toil. For example, I do this by highlighting their contributions with the rest of the team and including it favorably in their review
- I attract and hire a diverse team across a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, locations and strengths
Hiring and Talent Development
- I am actively involved in interviewing and assessing candidates to help us build a diverse and talented team. In addition, I ensure my team is calibrated and conducting interviews.
- I build strong relationships with candidates and can represent Dropbox's mission, strategy, and culture throughout the interview process
- I set clear expectations, evaluate, and manage both high and low performance with a focus on excellence and growth
- I can guide and grow senior ICs, helping them advance their careers by finding highly-leveraged roles for them within the organization, not just my team
Organizational Design
- I structure my team so the right people are in the right roles with clearly defined responsibilities. I independently ensure projects are staffed appropriately to set them up for success, placing my strongest technical leaders where they are the most needed and impactful
- I create equitable growth opportunities and delegate appropriately for everyone on my team
- I can independently plan for the headcount and recruiting needs of my team
🌈 Culture
Collaboration
- I help break down silos within and across functions and influence others to reach the best outcome for Dropbox, regardless of my level/title
- I build deep cross-functional relationships, facilitate the right conversations, balancing multiple perspectives, and engage in productive conflict with thoughtful questioning/challenging, disagreeing and committing when necessary to move decisions forward
Organizational Health
- I enable others to bring their authentic selves everyday and contribute to building community at Dropbox
- I remove barriers to inclusion for my team and ensure diverse perspectives are considered and included
- When I become aware of any lapse in my team’s culture, I communicate and follow through on plans to correct and prevent recurrence of the lapse
- I am aware of my public presence and actions and their influence on the people around me and Dropbox’s culture
- I ensure diverse perspectives are included, leveraging inclusive meeting practices
- I practice the Dropbox Diversity Commitments on a regular basis
Communication
- I communicate with clarity, brevity, focus, and tailor my message to my audience
- I proactively share information so the relevant stakeholders are informed and aligned
- I hold crucial conversations even when they feel uncomfortable, and I listen to and seek to understand others
- I champion my team and team members with others at Dropbox, including leadership
Culture Leader
- I create an environment of psychological safety where all Dropboxers are included and heard to support connection, empathy, and productive conflict where dissenting opinions are valued and addressed
- I hold team members accountable to actions that uphold Dropbox core values and support our engineering community
- I help my team network and build relationships across Dropbox, creating connection and inclusion across my team and with other teams
🦉 Craft
Software Design
- I am able to give quality feedback on designs written by other members of my team, asking probing, insightful questions that solidify choices and surface erroneous assumptions
- I encourage ways to simplify systems. I prioritize work that will lead to lower maintenance and costs with meaningful and measurable impact.
- I preemptively identify technical risks before they jeopardize the project.
- I resolve cross-team dependencies earlier to ensure the successful execution of the project.
- I discourage re-inventing the wheel by leveraging other Dropbox solutions or off-the-shelf solutions with the possible trade-off in mind.
Architecture Design
- I establish processes for rolling out a component or major feature (and deprecating an existing system or feature) reliably
- I discourage introducing toil and future maintenace work by reviewing potential scaling issues and requiring adequate documentation.
- I require and monitor clear success and learning metrics consistently post-launch through the lifetime of the system or feature.
- I’m capable of reviewing the overall health and engineering quality of a system or collection of features - including requiring regular health reviews, test strategy and ensuring that the health and maintenance of my team's systems
Technical Strategy
- I hold my team accountable for alignment of the software and systems in my area to overall technical strategy, making tradeoffs where appropriate in consultation with staff engineers
Business Acumen
- I engage in listening sessions (All Hands, Quarterly Business Updates, etc.) to increase my learning and guide my work/priorities
- I have a working knowledge of Dropbox’s org/team structure and how teams work together across Dropbox, and able to independently work with partner engineering teams to unblock code reviews, and engineering designs