Nobody Is Teaching Engineering Leadership Anymore

I have had some version of this same conversation at least 20 times this year. There seems to be a marked uptick in the number of engineering teams attempting to build their first hardware thing. Many are startups, yes, but an equal or greater number are software engineering companies that are attempting to branch out. Whenever I chat with them, they typically ask me a question, and it’s almost always one of two things.

The first is some version of “is this done?” They have a thing that works, but they cannot tell if it is ready to ship out to customers.

The second is “how do I plan more than one week into the future?” They’ve only been taught to run two week sprints. The project they are now starting has at least a 6 month timeline and the planning instinct they built their career on, or were taught at university, stops being useful.

My feeling looking around the world today is that many of the structures that used to support training of new engineering leaders have disappeared. We have lots of support for individuals doing engineering, but engineering is a team sport and as anyone who has played a sport knows, you need a leader.

My first jobs in engineering were led by great leaders. They painted clear visions of the future 6 months from now for the team. They had experience from many university or corporate training programs with formal mentorship structures on how to hone the craft of technical leadership.

Then the software engineering revolution took over the rhetoric of engineering leadership because that’s where the lucrative amount of money was. It’s not that these lessons are not applicable, but the craft of building software differs so radically from anything in the physical world that the set of best practices and intuition about what works of course starts to diverge over time.

Now 25 years after the Agile Manifesto was published, the software engineering industry is going through another time of radical change, confusing engineers everywhere even more. It’s a time for hardware teams that requires great leadership skills and style to build something great and not be lost in the swamp of LLM slop that can sometimes masquerade as “experience”.

So, how can the new leaders of today, specifically those leading hardware teams, learn to be great? The most effective answer, as with many things, is one on one mentoring / coaching. That is what I do as much as I can in my consulting work where I try to help teams grow their engineering leaders.

Buuuuutttt, that’s not a very satisfying or scalable answer. So honestly I’m trying to figure it out as well.

What I hear from the people I work with on this:

• Universities are not currently the place for this, though maybe they could be again in the future?

• The business model of most hacker / makerspaces is very hard / not possible any longer in many places of the world

• Most accelerators / investors are not empowered or experienced to help companies on this

• Books are too slow and not engaging enough for most of the reader’s preferences in the engineering industry

• Videos are decent, but mostly made to be entertaining, not super useful due to the reality of publishing high quality videos on youtube / the internet

• Something like a “choose your own adventure” or field guide book of old could be useful, but one does not exist.

I plan to spend some more focused time writing about this over the next few weeks and publishing some general ideas / learnings from my consulting engagements, which are perhaps more broadly useful to others. Maybe I’ll eventually compile them into a digital choose your own adventure or something. Maybe I’ll resurrect an old idea I had for running engineering design reviews as a service, where I match experts to teams to run reviews.

But mainly right now I am interested in what you think about this. Are you seeing the same in your work? Do you have a different idea to solve it?