yr, I wrote about my first 3-month manager experience. I shared a few of the immediate changes I noticed, including more meetings, mentoring and training opportunities, a broader scope, and increased visibility into the behind-the-scenes work.
Time flies, and I actually have now been a manager for a full yr. It’s a busy yr as I adapt to the brand new challenges — because of this, I’ve gone from writing three articles on TDS every month to only one. Meanwhile, it has been a really eye-opening and rewarding yr. My team grew from three to 5, and now supports a wide selection of functions, from GTM and Operations to Product.
In this text, I’ll reflect on my first yr and share what I imagine are the three pillars of being an efficient frontline data team manager: prioritization, empowerment, and recognition.
I. Prioritization
People management is about alignment — ensuring stakeholders, my team, and I are all on the identical page about what matters most and what comes next.
Nonetheless, data teams lately are sometimes overwhelmed with requests. Taking my team for instance, we now have weekly stakeholder meetings to debate latest and ongoing projects; We have now a #data-help Slack channel to intake ad-hoc requests; We also get pings like “urgent request, need assistance now” on occasion. In consequence, we at all times have an extended to-do list than what we are able to realistically handle without burning out. Due to this fact, it’s critical for me, because the manager, to set the priority appropriately and be sure that every party is aligned.
What does this mean for me?
1. Understand business priority
As an alternative of trying to grasp the specifics of each request, I’ve learned it’s higher to begin with the massive picture. At the tip of the day, all departments are evaluated based on their contribution to the business growth, and the info team is not any exception. Due to this fact, project prioritization must be based on the corporate’s focus and business impacts. I learn this from my manager and senior leadership, and I check in recurrently with key stakeholders to grasp what’s on top of their minds. All these contexts help me to prioritize work for my team.
Then I prioritize the tasks based on the business impact and urgency. Generally speaking, the team should prioritize high-impact and high-urgency work, triage or delegate high-urgency but low-impact tasks, schedule and plan for high-impact but low-urgency projects, and delay or decline low-urgency and low-impact asks. Let’s see some examples below:
- The Sales team wants a dashboard to automate their manual quota attainment calculation. Does this project have value? In fact. It gives sales rep timely visibility into their performance, and saves someone on Revenue Operations just a few hours per week. Is that this urgent? Not likely, stakeholders can still survive without the dashboard 🙂
- The identical team also wants to investigate the performance of a brand new AI-powered automated email channel. Is it impactful? Sure. An automatic outreach channel could save sales reps time and potentially result in more conversions. How urgent is it? Pretty urgent, as this can be a latest initiative and we’d like data to grasp its efficiency and iterate.
On this case, we’ll naturally prioritize the second project.
One other factor to think about is the effort. This helps to grasp what number of tasks we are able to realistically tackle in each sprint.
2. Delegate and check in:
One great progress I’ve seen prior to now yr is that after I arrange the method and philosophy of prioritization, my team quickly adapted to it and regularly owned this process themselves. This is essentially because of our clear embedded structure — each member supports a selected business domain and works very closely with the business leads, allowing them to grasp each team’s priority well. Due to this fact, nowadays, my role is generally to pass along my high-level understanding of the corporate strategies and help my team connect the dots across domains. I encourage the team to set priorities directly with their stakeholders. I often sit quietly within the cross-functional prioritization meeting, let my team drive the conversation, and step in just after they need it.
3. Be the bad guy
Sometimes this also involves protecting my team’s focus. Since my team works so closely with the business leads and has built strong relationships, they have a tendency to simply accept more requests than they might realistically handle, which may lead to burnout in the long run. While I at all times remind them that saying no is a very important skill (I learned this the hard way during my IC time), I also step in to be “the bad guy” to barter priorities and timelines with stakeholders. In fact, the negotiation again ties back to how each project links to the business impact and the trade-offs we now have to make with limited resources.
What could I do higher for prioritization? One in every of my biggest learning is that prioritization doesn’t should be limited to the present requests. An amazing manager doesn’t just triage requests, but additionally finds scope for the team: identifying high-impact, strategic opportunities and selling those ideas to stakeholders. It’s something I aim to do more of moving forward.
II. Empowerment
A mentor once told me that a key skill in management is to “give advice confidently on things that you simply don’t fully understand”. It’d sound dangerous and counterintuitive at first. But to be clear, this doesn’t mean one should pretend that they know the whole lot. As an alternative, it means being comfortable making decisions and giving guidance based on incomplete information. It’s about two key manager skills to empower the team — get the context quickly and unblock the team.
1. Get the context quickly
Let’s be honest, a manager won’t be the material expert on the whole lot their team works on. But we still have to know enough to reason through trade-offs, risks, and priorities. In that sense, a very good data team manager must be a generalist who knows a little bit of the whole lot. For instance, one person on my team supports the Marketing team, but I haven’t worked directly with the Marketing team as an IC prior to now. In consequence, I had to select up essential marketing data knowledge quickly through reading key metrics dashboards and attending marketing business review meetings. Though this doesn’t mean I do know all the main points of our Multi-touch Attribution model, it helps me to grasp the landscape well enough to ask good questions and offer support.
2. Unblock the team
When someone on the team is blocked, as a manager, my first step is to grasp what the blocker is. If the ask just isn’t clear enough, I can make clear it with stakeholders; Whether it is a technical challenge, I’ll brainstorm with the team, and even do research myself to seek out the very best approach; Whether it is resulting from a dependency on one other team, I can escalate the ask to get it resolved faster, etc.
Empowerment also means equipping the team with the abilities they should succeed. This, in fact, covers each technical skills and soft skills.
- Technical skills: After I first became a manager, our worker engagement survey highlighted a spot in learning and development (L&D). Since then, I actually have introduced a monthly poll to find out which technical topic the team is most fascinated about, after which I host an L&D session to dive deeper into the subject. Thus far, we now have covered topics including experimentation, causal inference, time series evaluation, AI use cases in DS, etc.
- Soft skills: One method to grow the team on the non-technical front is to provide them autonomy and trust. As I discussed above, I encourage the team to guide cross-functional meetings to boost business communication. I also give them opportunities to present their work during team meetings so that they can practice in a protected and supportive environment.
Is there anything I could do higher for empowerment? One area I’m still learning is the right way to balance between autonomy and support. Sometimes I could also be too hands-off — I don’t check in fairly often to avoid micromanaging. Nonetheless, in some cases, my team might as an alternative appreciate early guidance or feedback.
III. Recognition
Earlier this yr, I went through my first annual review cycle as a manager, and I used to be capable of promote one direct report on my team. Promotion is one of the crucial powerful types of recognition. Nonetheless, it just isn’t at all times feasible given company budgets, team size, tenure, etc. There are a few additional ways I believe a manager can utilize:
1. Shout-outs and kudos
I try my best to focus on the impact of the team, no matter size. It may very well be an insightful evaluation, a terrific presentation, an in depth documentation, or perhaps a creative idea. Celebrating these wins publicly in team meetings, Slack channels, or via emails is at all times a terrific method to show appreciation and keep the team morale. I also encourage my team to provide kudos to one another to foster a collaborative environment.
2. Give credit upward
It is usually essential to share the team’s achievements with leadership, attributing project success clearly. This increases the team’s visibility and paves the method to future promotion.
3. Support profession goals
Profession growth is one other type of recognition. I believe managers should fully understand the profession goals of every direct report and help them to deal with the gap. Due to this fact, I actually have monthly profession growth check-ins with everyone to debate this topic. For instance, one in all my reports is fascinated about transitioning right into a Data Engineer role. Since we sit in the identical org because the DE team, there are plenty of opportunities to collaborate. Due to this fact, I encourage her to work closely with DE and tackle small DE tasks inside her domain step-by-step, and keep a running list of all of the DE-related work she has done to construct a case for the transition.
Anything I need to enhance for recognition? From the IC perspective, performance review may very well be a myth. Now that I actually have experienced a performance review cycle as a manager and got some insights, I need to assist my team higher understand how it really works and the right way to higher position themselves for achievement.
With just one yr into management, I still have plenty to learn. But I’m grateful for the teachings up to now, the team I get to work with, and the chance to continue to grow — each as a knowledge skilled and as a manager.
Do you could have any suggestions for brand spanking new managers or have lessons learned from your individual experience? I might love to listen to your thoughts!
