Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager

Performing the Exercise with Your Staff

I’m sure you’ll have seen that the exercise above in which you define your vision and plan is both engaging and motivating. The good news is that you can now go through this exercise with your staff. You should have a pretty good idea how to do it as you’ve just done it yourself, but here are some additional tips.

Let’s start with defining a vision.

Step 1: Ten-Years Exercise

First, they’ll need to look back over the last ten years using a timeline in the same way that you did. You can decide to do this collaboratively—such as drawing it all out on a whiteboard together—or perhaps they’d prefer to go away and think about it. It’s up to them.

The result of this stage, regardless of whether ...