Hello, and welcome to Advancing Women in Tech (AWIT's) Real-World Engineering Management Specialization. My name is Nancy Wang, I'm the General Manager of Data Protection Services and Governance Services at Amazon Web Services or AWS for short as well as the founder and CEO of Advancing Women in Tech. Our content is unique, because it emphasizes real world education. Meaning that we teach from the same material, developed and taught at the most popular and successful tech companies that many of you may have heard of and would someday like to work for. This is AWITS third Coursera specialization in three years, and I'd like to thank AWS and Coursera for their continued support in helping us produce this quality content for you all. We also feature instructors who are full time executives at top tech companies. Our instructors are the same ones who make the hiring as well as promotion decisions for engineering managers. During the specialization, distinguished instructors for the specialization will include not only myself. But some li of the leading tech executives from companies such as Stripe, such as Google, such as AWS, Microsoft, and so many more. In this specialization, we look at how some of the most successful technology companies in the world, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. train and evaluate their engineering managers and technical program managers. We focus on these engineering organizations because billions of people around the world rely on their products billions of times each and every day. And of course, these companies are tech driven, which means that engineering managers and technical program managers are in decision making roles and they get to drive the future of these companies. These companies have achieved success, scale, talent, technology, and data to become leaders in the discipline of managing engineers. We've structured this specialization to address common questions that these companies will ask engineering manager candidates during interviews. So the following are ten common questions that I ask engineering managers who want to work for me that formed the outline for how we created this course. One, who was your best hire and why? Two, how did you help her perform and grow? Three, who was your worst hire and why? Four, how do you handle poor performers? Five, tell me about a time you managed a conflict. Six, tell me about your biggest mistake and what you learned. Seven, what are your management processes and mechanisms? Eight, how do you ensure your deliverables are of the right quality? Nine, what metrics would you track? And ten, for a fun exercise, let's design YouTube together. Throughout the lectures in this specialization, we'll often refer to the engineering manager as you. We do this to put you in the engineering managers seat, help you think through challenges as an engineering manager might. No matter your background or career objectives, you're welcome to take this specialization to learn about how top technology companies train their managers. Perhaps you are thinking about becoming a manager in the future, that's a great career goal and we are all here to support you. This specialization will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses as a manager and also provide you the tools to address your weaknesses and grow quickly. So maybe you just got asked to lead your first project or mentor your first intern. Congratulations. This specialization will give you all the tools you need to work effectively with your team so that you can spend more of your time doing the work rather than on managerial overhead. Perhaps you want to remain an individual contributor, but you also want to learn managerial skills to work better with your manager or other members of your team. This is a brilliant investment of your time. As you know, when you grow in seniority, you'll spend more and more of your time advising managers and mentoring junior team members. Even if you are not interested in becoming a manager yourself, taking the time to learn managerial skills can help individual contributors if you choose that to be your career path, accelerate that career path. Finally, maybe you've already become a manager and you're using this as an opportunity to look for new ideas, frameworks, in which case you're really welcome. I hope that the content you find here inspires you to create a better environment for the teams that you lead. By the end of this module, you will understand the expectations that elite software engineering organizations like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have for their managers. Two, explain the relationships between engineering managers and other managers and an engineering driven organization, such as technical program managers, product managers, and general managers. And four, articulate the difference in responsibilities, career ladders, and compensation between an individual contributor and a manager. And lastly, identify the business value that good managers bring to these organizations. Are you excited? Well, how about, let's begin with a simple question, what is management? Management is the responsibility and accountability that arises from running and transforming a business. Your employees depend on you to make good decisions for livelihood and your customers depend on your product decisions to accomplish their goals. Question, can you manage a business without having direct reports? Yes, you can, we'll see how briefly a subtype of management is people management. People management involves creating and maintaining one high functioning team of individual contributors. Engineering managers are usually people managers, a further subtype of people management is the manager of managers. A manager of managers creates and maintains multiple high functioning teams that work well together. The opposite of a manager of managers is a line manager, the term line manager is an abbreviation of the term front line manager. A line manager has direct reports who are individual contributors, and for many of us being a line manager is a step to becoming a manager of managers. The final concept we'll discuss is a team, a team consists of a manager and all of their direct reports. Managers are accountable and responsible for the performance of their team. Now, let's better understand what an engineering manager does by explaining how they work with other managers.
