Hatica Is Building Great Engineering Managers. Here’s How.

An engineering manager is a bridge between the two opposite ends of engineering organizations: people, and project management. Right from creating team consensus to hiring new talent, resolving alignment challenges, and building, and executing roadmaps with the product team; an EM juggles multiple hats in a day. A great engineering manager is expected to be a born hustler!

Engineering Managers Have Hard Jobs, Period. 

Over the years, the tech industry has had multiple instances of 'devs vs managers', with even Google's Larry Page a party to the scuffle. In 2002, Page decided to introduce a flat, manager-free hierarchy in Google after much skepticism. The experiment, as predicted, failed and realized the intrinsic need for managers, even for a lean team like Google back then. 

Even Page owes Google's success to EMs in a way that they enable project prioritization, facilitate team collaboration, craft communication strategy, and even break down a dev's walls in expanding professionally. Despite all their contribution to streamlining team efforts and realizing organizational goals, it is usually the managers that bear the brunt of team unworkability, inefficient workflows, and communication barriers between product, business, and engineering. 

In the last few years, most managers have been villainized for bossware, and micromanagement. While it might have been true in individual capacities, most managers struggle to keep their teams intact, visualize each IC's work, and resolve developer's imposter syndrome for their own code; fighting such a war at all fronts might sometimes appear as "micromanagement," making devs resist managers- their biggest support system in an organization. 

All these blockers have the same root: lack of visibility for EMs into their dev's work. And that's where Hatica becomes the #1 tool arsenal for engineering managers. 

4 Reasons Why Engineering Managers Love Hatica

Now that we are pretty clear on how challenging an EM's day job can be, let's see how Hatica helps engineering managers to be people's leaders with time: 

1. Get Visibility Into Your Team's Workflow 

We already talked enough about what harm poor visibility does to engineering. Factual visibility allows EMs to know the 'why,' and 'how' of their engineers, and the SDLC process followed. Low visibility can often snowball into:

• A broken SDLC, deployment delays, and 

• Less effective coding time for developers 

• Unsustainable work distribution 

• Disturbed well-being of teammates

• An omnipresent communication debt

The list goes never-ending, so much so that it is apt to say- nothing harms an EM-IC relationship more than lack of visibility. So what's next? How do EMs gain team visibility without disturbing a team's flow state or going back and forth in taking stock of a dev's workday? The answer lies in data analytics.   

Hatica was built on the idea of making an EM's life easier. With 130+ metrics and 13 dashboards, Hatica helps managers gain granular visibility with real-time data. Now, managers don't have to push ICs for status updates, but rather get all engineering reports in one place. 

Hatica’s dev metric grid does the heavy lifting in collating all engineering data in a centralized ecosystem, and using it for data-driven 1:1s, taking stock of team’s work, and developer productivity.

With these data-driven insights, managers can identify workload blockers in teams, signs of an overburdened dev, instances and reasons behind productive and unproductive work. What’s more is Hatica doesn’t treat data as just a mix of numbers, but can even create impact in streamlining developer well-being, and break down team silos. Managers can do so by looking at the maker time and deep work state of engineers, to plan their future work schedules better, and even preempt burnout.

[Read: Maker vs. Manager Schedule]

2. Productive Sprint Planning and Retros 

Sprint success is the pain-point of every engineering manager. It is these planning sessions that sets the pace of future engineering excellence for a team. Sprint planning is more than a checklist task for EMs; it can shoot up development velocity, and has a multiplier effect in team building. But when done haphazardly without context, the same sprints can even cause delayed project development. To prevent your sprints from failing repeatedly, and achieve maximum sprint efficiency, Hatica has built the project dashboard. 

The project delivery overview helps teams to visualize their delivery trends, their stuck-points, and the way ahead for a smooth sprint. When teams have all sprint data at one place, it becomes easier for EMs to reduce loading of any unplanned work on devs, thereby, improving planning accuracy, and expanding on developer experience. 

When looked back, teams know what was different in this sprint vs the previous ones. That’s where the sprint performance dashboard helps realize a manager’s goals.

3. Combining Git Analytics with Engineering Management 

Git Analytics needs no introduction- for EMs, it is a single source of truth to analyze developer flow with current work expectations. 

Engineering management is synonymous to reduced workflow inefficiencies, and that’s where tracking and analyzing Git Analytics, with defined contexts becomes vital. The metrics, like cycle time, code churn, code efficiency, and code review collaboration helps in visualizing the state of an organization’s SDLC. By mapping these process indicators with Hatica’s well-being and DORA dashboard, engineering managers can have a complete picture of each step of the development cycle. 

Hatica takes engineering excellence one notch further with its Hatica Goals feature. 

Hatica Goals offers pre-made templates for teams to insert and track their voluntary goals as a team, and IC. The feature takes care of the ‘to where and by when’ part of the problem by helping teams to base themselves against their own created benchmark and gets updates as soon as a breach happens. Devs can also log their Git Analytics metrics under Hatica Goals- and foresee where they stand today, and what they intend to achieve in next week/month/quarter.  

Every time a bottleneck is identified and resolved, teams move closer to continuous improvement, and a positive developer experience- the main goal of any engineering manager.

4. Building on Developer Experience  

As teams become more complex, and distributed, managers need to find innovative ways to keep devs hooked and collaboration, friction free. 

Hatica can help engineering managers to experience a paradigm shift in how they understand their team complexities. With data in hand, and a 360 degree view of how the whole SDLC unfolds, the focus shifts from “there are too many devs to handle” to “let’s make the best of each dev, and architect a top-tier team with a flawless product building capacity.”

Streamlined dev workflows go a long way in enhancing a developer’s overall satisfaction with every workplace variable: the toolstack, other ICs, relationship with managers, and the development process. 

A great DX is easier to build, when EMs have enough context, and data in place. If developers are pretty excited about working on a project, but couldn’t deliver much value as they are too stuck under interview or incident load; then your team’s overall DX is bound to suffer. All this could cause a dent on an engineering manager’s perception as a people-centric leader. 

Hatica takes care of all aspects of developer experience by working on each step of the development cycle- right from writing codes, to shipping to prod, identifying workflow blockers, doing meaningful work, and even non-core tasks such as hiring, and attending meetings. Hatica leverages all these indicators as to-follow metrics so teams have a smooth DX journey. 

[ Read Related: Career Path to CTO ]

Data-Driven Engineering Management with Hatica 

Today, more and more EMs are transforming themselves into architects, catalysts, and team bridgers. Managers have a multi-functional role to play in an engineering team, with diverse stakeholders in play- right from junior devs, to directors, PMs, and VP of engineering. 

Limited visibility in a rapidly changing tech world is the new reality for engineering managers. With complexities rising in software development, there is only a thin line of difference between workplace surveillance, and using data to harness team potential. The day this imbalance becomes more visible and apparent, data’s role in engineering management will start taking more precedence.

In an ideal world, developers have highly effective coding hours, managers know where the team stands, and what’s more to be done, and everyone in the team wins in their own ways. Today’s engineering process is far from perfect; however, with continuous iteration, and process improvement, teams could move way closer to their ‘north-star’ engineering flow than expected. 

Hatica can help teams to move from the command-and-control to work at your own pace, own time approach. More so, Hatica’s data dashboard equips engineering managers with agility, creating ICs to be an innovation powerhouse, and scale with limited resources. 

Transform your engineering process with Hatica today. Request a demo here--->