I've been at three companies that scaled 5x while I was there. “No matter how strong your toolkit is for effective one-on-ones, not everyone will open up right away,” she says. But she kept bumping up against the limits of conversation. Why Flow is a Must-Have, Not a Nice-to-HaveĪs she grew from one management role to the next - leading interns and architects alike - Maxwell had always cared about her engineers’ feelings toward their work. And she describes how anxiety and boredom creep into a team, and how managers can supportively nudge engineers back into the ideal state of flow. She shares the simple graph that has become one of the most powerful resources in her management toolkit. In this exclusive interview, Maxwell, who’s held engineering management roles at Slack, Apple, Yahoo! and Pinterest, explains how she built a concrete evaluative framework around flow. She was missing a way to turn emotion into data, and she found it in an unexpectedly fuzzy place: the age-old concept of flow. Resolved to never again lose a great developer unnecessarily, Maxwell turned her engineer’s mind to the gaps in her management tooling. If she only had a clearer line of sight into how they were feeling, she could have responded better and earlier - and perhaps retained that talented programmer. Eventually though, she realized the problem was less about the work itself, and more about how her people were feeling about doing the work. She was deeply plugged into precise metrics like scrolling speeds, crash rates and memory usage. There had to have been a red flag, so she stepped back to examine the broader context: Her team was building a flagship application, and carefully integrating stakeholders in design, engineering and leadership. Then, one day, after a few months, he told Maxwell he was returning to Apple. It was the type of big, ambitious project engineers want to sink their teeth into - and she easily recruited one of her former coworkers from Apple. In fact, she turned it into a management tool that she uses every day.īack when Maxwell was the Director of Engineering at Yahoo!, she was tasked with building a brand-new, multi-platform messaging product. Many business leaders hesitate when you ask them to share their biggest mistake.
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