The Minimum Viable Manager: Building Trust, Feedback, and Alignment

But this technical contributor to manager problem, it's something we've recognized as an industry, and certainly on the Engineering Culture Podcast, we've explored it many times.

Why haven't we solved that problem yet?

Yeah, it's, it's interesting.

I mean, you know, I talk with a lot of people, a lot of leaders, and, uh, Casey Handmer, who's the, the founder of Terraform Industries, I love how he says, like, this has been a problem since before the pyramids, right? G- you know, I, I think in many ways, if you look back at the history of humanity, our greatest strength has always been our ability to get large groups of people to work together.

And so like any superhero, our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness.

Like, it, it is the defining feature of us and it, and that is the defining challenge.

And I honestly think a lot of it just has to do with there's so much complexity and nuance to it.

What works in one situation isn't gonna work in another situation, and it could be the people that are involved, it could be the stage of their life that they are in, it could be the organization that they are in.

It's something that I think is fundamental.

I mean, as a perfect example, Amazon is famous for their, you know, meeting memos, where before a meeting you have to write a memo about what the meeting's gonna be about.

And I've talked with a lot of startup organizations that are starting to scale.

Who do they hire? Well, they, they hire people from Amazon.

They hire executives from Amazon because they were really successful, and they come in and they try to take the thing that worked at Amazon and have it work in this new company, and it always fails because the context just is different.

And so I think that's ultimately why it's so difficult, is that there's so many different varieties of it, and that's honestly why I call my book Minimum Viable Manager, because I don't think there is a way to say, like, this is what the right manager is.

It's like you need to get to a point where you have enough basics to not fail so that you can iterate and learn, just like we do in engineering.

You need to lay that foundation so that you can iterate, because how you lead is gonna be unique to you, your team, and your organization.