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Management Map of Content

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Management - Map of Content

This domain explores management and leadership as practiced in technology organisations. Management here is not treated as an abstract discipline—it is the applied craft of building and sustaining high-performing teams, running effective delivery, and navigating organisational complexity in real software environments.

The content builds from foundational questions (what management is, how it differs from leadership) through the practical daily work (people development, goal-setting, delivery) to the structural and strategic concerns (organisational design, influence, engineering-specific challenges). Throughout, the focus is on evidence-based practice and the hard-won lessons that distinguish management as a skill from management as a title.

This domain connects closely to Architecture (technical leadership, Conway’s Law), Psychology (team dynamics, behaviour change), and Business (systems thinking, organisational learning).

🎯 Management Fundamentals

The conceptual foundations: what management is, how it differs from leadership, and why both matter in complex organisations.

  • The-Rands-Test — A diagnostic checklist for evaluating management quality within an engineering organisation
  • Three-Managerial-Superpowers — The three capabilities that distinguish effective managers: information gathering, decision-making under uncertainty, and context provision
  • Manager-as-Communication-Hub — The manager as the critical node that translates, filters, and routes information across team boundaries

👥 People Management

The core of management work: building relationships with individuals, developing their careers, and creating the conditions for sustained performance.

Hiring & Onboarding

  • Bellwether-Interviewers — Using trusted, consistent interviewers as calibration anchors to maintain hiring quality at scale

Performance & Career Development

1:1s & Feedback

  • 1on1-Meeting-Formats — A typology of one-on-one meeting structures matched to different managerial contexts and goals
  • The-Twinge — The manager’s intuitive signal that something is wrong, and how to act on it productively
  • Feedback-Orientation-Model — A model for understanding how individuals differ in their capacity to receive and use feedback

🏗️ Team Building & Organisational Design

How teams are structured, how culture forms, and how the design of an organisation shapes the work it produces.

  • Free-Electrons — High-autonomy engineers who operate outside normal team structures and must be managed differently
  • Incrementalists-and-Completionists — Two fundamental cognitive styles that produce predictable tensions and complementary strengths in engineering teams
  • Organics-and-Mechanics — A personality typology distinguishing intuition-driven from process-driven engineers, with implications for team composition
  • Reorg-Navigation-Principles — How to survive and capitalise on organisational restructuring as a manager or individual contributor
  • DNA-Meeting — The Design and Architecture meeting as a structured forum for technical decision-making and architectural governance

🎯 Goal Setting & Strategy Execution

Frameworks for aligning individuals, teams, and organisations around shared direction and measurable outcomes.

  • Hacker-Culture-Growth-Paradox — The tension between the informal, autonomous culture that attracts engineers and the structure required as organisations scale
  • Rands-1.0-Hierarchy — Lopp’s articulation of the values and priorities that define effective engineering leadership

📋 Delivery & Process Management

Running the work: agile practices, prioritisation, estimation, and managing the gap between plan and reality.

  • Trickle-Theory — The principle that small, consistent actions compound over time to produce significant organisational change
  • Malcolm-Events — Pivotal, often unplanned moments that irreversibly alter a team member’s trajectory or commitment
  • Context-Capture — The systematic practice of documenting situational context to preserve institutional memory and enable better decisions
  • The-Soak — The deliberate practice of allowing ambiguous decisions to incubate before forcing resolution

💬 Communication & Influence

Managing up, across, and outward. Stakeholder alignment, difficult conversations, and the mechanics of organisational influence without authority.

  • Information-Starvation — The organisational dysfunction that emerges when teams lack the context and transparency they need to function effectively
  • Managementese — The use of vague, jargon-heavy language that managers employ to avoid commitment or uncomfortable specificity
  • Alignment-vs-Informational-Meetings — Distinguishing meetings that seek to create consensus from those that seek only to transmit information
  • Players-vs-Pawns — A framework for understanding team members’ agency, investment, and willingness to influence outcomes
  • Crisis-Management-War-Room — The structure and dynamics of high-stakes, cross-functional crisis response in engineering organisations

💻 Engineering Management

Management as practiced specifically in software engineering contexts: the engineer-to-manager transition, staff engineering, technical leadership, and the relationship between management and architecture.

Structure Notes

  • Managing-Engineers-Framework — A synthesised framework for understanding and managing the cognitive and motivational patterns of software engineers
  • Engineering-Manager-Toolkit — An integrated set of tools and practices for engineering managers drawn from Lopp’s accumulated experience

Atomic Notes

  • NADD — Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder: the pattern of rapid context-switching that characterises how many engineers process information
  • Nerd-Cave-and-Deep-Work — The physical and temporal conditions under which engineers achieve their most productive, creative states

📚 Literature

Source material for this domain.

  • Managing Humans - Lopp - 2019 — Michael Lopp’s collection of management essays drawn from engineering leadership at Apple, Pinterest, Slack, and Palantir

For new managers: Start with Management Fundamentals to orient the role, then move to People Management—the 1:1 and feedback work is where most impact lives early on.

For experienced managers: Focus on Organisational Design, Strategy Execution, and the cross-domain connections to Business and Architecture.

For architects and technical leads: Engineering Management and the cross-domain Architecture connections are most directly relevant. See also Knowledge-Flow-in-Software-Architecture and Conway’s-Law.

Cross-Domain Connections

Management knowledge compounds when connected across domains:

  • Architecture: Organisational design and Conway’s Law; technical leadership; the architect-as-leader role; knowledge flow in software organisations
  • Psychology: Psychological safety; feedback models; team dynamics; behaviour change as the mechanism behind performance
  • Business: Systems thinking applied to organisational behaviour; the five disciplines of the learning organisation; mental models

Sources

This is a navigation/organisation note. For sources, see individual linked notes.

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organisation, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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