Not yet complete. - Ideas for frequently asked questions
1. Who created the guide?
I'm Terry Brown, and I've been a software engineering lead in some form or another through a lot of my later career. I had performed the role very badly in my early career, and during those early years when I first started, I wish I had had a structured approach/tool to support the early conversations I had with my own managers, my teams, and to give me some structure for my own growth.
In my later career, I'm driven by creating environments where teams can thrive and do their best work - with a heavy focus on high performing culture, psychological safety, and continuous improvement.
In my personal life, I'm married and have 3 kids. I am an active LGBT+ ally and my pronouns are he/him, and I enjoy getting away from this with cycling, running and more recently rowing.
2. How can I get in touch?
You can reach me on twitter, or LinkedIn. I'd love to chat to you if you are considering using this guide in any way, and I'm always open to discussions around the topics covered here - there is so much I don't know.
3. How can I use the guide?
I have open sourced this guide, so feel free to use it, adapt it, grow it and feedback on it. If you are using it, I'd love to hear from you and see some attribution - a tool is only useful if folks use it.
4. Can I contribute?
Please! Although I've spent a lot of time reading and digesting information, and have a number of years time served, I'm the first to admit I have a lot of gaps myself, and these will be manifest within this guide and tooling. The more people I can get to input, the better - please reach out on twitter or LinkedIn as per the links and let's have a chat.
5. How do I start?
Have a quick read of the guide, in particular the 'start here' section. Then load up the tool, which is currently a google sheet with some instructions in it, and make a start.
6. How long does it take to complete?
I've run through it now with a few people, and it tends to take about 30minutes pre-read to understand the various categories, then 30mins from yourself and your manager for scoring, then a 30min chat at the end. So all told, about an hour and a half invested.
7. What is the outcome of going through this exercise?
At the end of going through this, you should have a copy of the spreadsheet with a more thorough understanding of yourself, your strengths and growth opportunities, and have that correlated at least with your manager, but perhaps also with an organisational view. This should give you one or two areas to focus your growth activities on.
8. I need to improve SKILL X - how do I go about it?
This guide will expand over time to provide links to more targetted resources for each particular area. As it stands, the resources section is not yet targetted, so a conversation with your manager, some judicious googling, and perhaps some reading around the subject is the best starting point.
8. I have a question that isn't answered anywhere on the site - help!
Please get in touch using the links above - I'd love to engage in conversation on this and grow it over time.