Boss Mode: Making the Most of Your Manager

[Music] welcome to Friday of GDC and for some of you welcome to GDC you get to start with me and I'm going to talk to you about management um my name is Jenny I am an engineering manager at Deep Mind and I've also worked at Riot games Zinger and a bunch of other places and this is a talk about being managed or having a manager not being a manager I basically wanted to collect some of the things I've learned after being on my side of the table that I really wish I'd learned sooner I've worked at some pretty big companies so some of these things will be pretty tactical to that situation but I do hope that even if you're in a smaller Studio there's something in this talk for you when you're working with someone who's got a little bit more power than you do I hope this one take take away from

this talk that every single one of you will be able to put into practice and if you know everything great go teach it to someone else please I will caveat that you know there's going to be a few generalizations I'm talking about the average case and obviously sometimes that manager relationship can go bad that's a different talk it's not really for this stage um but I am going to be outside in the wrap-up area right after this talk I don't have time for questions I'm just going to go straight there afterwards please talk to me happy to talk about this subject all day long finally I have put together an online resource handout with a lot of the stuff I talk about so don't feel you need to take notes there will be a link at the end of the talk rather than make this a talk of Jenny thinks stuff I also talk to a whole bunch of people who are also managers or have had managers and I want to thank all of them for their input so let's get going it's day one at your new

company you get show on your desk and hey here's Jeff he's your manager I will be using Jeff as a fictional coworker throughout this talk I pick the name somewhat at random it's not a real Jeff um so you generally don't get told what that means just hey is your manager cool so let me tell you what I mean by manager well management means a lots of different things to lots of different people so when I talk about it I really just mean the person that you report to in an organizational chart they may have hired you they may have some kind of power to promote you they're like the person above you in some kind of weird hierarchy thing cool that that's who they are what do they do well I asked every single person from that previous slide that question like what do you do or what does your manager do and no two people said the same thing so that's a good start maybe think okay maybe I'm on to something doing a talk about this um words came through like empower

advise coach listen okay there's a pattern there it's about the art and craft of building humans not games not software but humans to build games you need humans so that's kind of cool management is needed but right okay I'm a manager my job is to do that to build humans why why should you folks care I just should be doing my job right fundamentally it's your career even the best manager in the world won't care about it as much as you do so if there's any way you can take even an iota of control over that and put yourself in the driving seat why not and that's really what this talk is going to be about because another real truth that came through especially as I talked to a whole bunch of folks management isn't often its own job I'm actually fairly privileged that I get to spend a lot of my time on this

craft but most managers especially in Game Dev are doing other jobs like they're the art lead or QA lead or a lead programmer and they've just been asked to manage people usually because somebody else quit half the time they don't get any training at all so they might have no training they might not have even been told what the job is they might have just been told hey Jeff's left you're now the manager good luck and so some of you might realize like you don't even necessarily want to be you've just had to step in so this talk might give you more insight into management than some of your managers have ever had and that's scary and that that kind of brings me to the the biggest point I want to make in this whole talk and also the most obvious one I'm afraid we are we are humans and okay I work at Deep mind so I had to add this I'm not trying to excuse

mediocrity but I'm kind of trying to explain it we make mistakes as managers we are learning this craft in production and even an experience manager the humans are so varied and and delightful that the problem you bring your manager might be the first time they've had to deal with it I learn new stuff every week every month all right I still haven't told you what the job is so let's talk a bit more about that and what what you and your manager what that contract should look like inside every manager there are two wolves these are my dogs bear with me uh this is Sammy he is a Golden Retriever and he loves people loves people um can't take him anywhere he is incredibly human oriented so that's half worn of a manager my other dog's sister's a 10-year-old rescue and she is results business when is my next food when is my next meal and that's it and so as with

dogs as with my dogs managers have to balance the needs of the people and the needs of the business that's easier than it sounds and your contract with your manager should look a bit like this they help you do the thing you are paid to do fundamentals sometimes it stops there but ultimately you're being given money in exchange for your time and your manager is there to make sure that that makes sense to everybody involved the best part my favorite part is they then Elevate that they level you up and they find ways to grow you ideally in ways that you want to be grown and find ways to just make you more than you were and the third part which is often downplayed but still a big part of it is making sure that all of that is in line with where the game is want game wants to go if I told my manager I wanted to take a class in or aami folding cool not so relevant for my job so maybe not on company time I don't know I haven't

asked him how do managers do this stuff on the left peopley stuff on the right worky stuff so using formal processes and where you might spend most of your time with your manager one-on ones and and direct support coaching help on the other side your manager has a whole bunch of context on the world around and it's part of their job to share that with you and help you make the most of that and I'll get later in the talk into how you can kind of get some of that from them and the fourth part I wanted to call this out because as a manager a lot of my reward Loops are really long I run into people at GDC who say hey this thing you told me like five years ago was really helpful like if if I was a player in a game and it took five years to get the reward I don't think I'd play that game so getting very Hands-On and trying to just feel like I'm useful is a big part of the job too but it can become inter interfering so we'll get to that as well

uh let's jump in with the actual concrete stuff so the second half of this talk is really giving you a bunch of things that you can do in these areas now I don't do all these things every day uh I gave this talk at work last week my manager was in the audience and he's just looking at me going you you don't do all these things like I don't it's situational I have done each and every one of them the people I talk to to to of Sanity check my my thoughts also have done a lot of them uh so they are really useful tactics and especially now we're in a hybrid world and your manager might not have as much visibility to what you're doing it's good to have some concrete things I will give you a warning though that the more you nerd out about this stuff the more likely it is you're going to become a manager so I like it all right let's let's jump in uh feedback cool so asking for

feedback actually there's a second part to this getting it now when I say feedback I don't know how many of you had that visceral reaction H feedback um we often use the word feedback and we mean critical feedback I actually like to broaden that to any kind of feedback and it can be harder to get the positive stuff but it's really important I I was told once that you want to have at least five pieces of positive feedback for every piece of growth feedback and usually we really don't so think about that when we do get brave enough to ask for feedback it can look like this and like don't get me wrong this is better than not asking for sure but if you ask me this question in a meeting you put me on the spot I am a human being as I pointed out I really promise I am a human and saying like Okay uh feedback

okay what am I thinking I'm trying to be kind of nice because you're sitting right there I'm super recently biased because I havn't had any time to think and I'm also probably going to shy away from the difficult topics because I need to word those very carefully to make sure my message is on point so I might say oh you yeah you did a great job with that that talk last week instead of really thinking about your goals and where you're going and what might be the most useful thing to say to you and I don't know about you especially the minorities in this audience but when we ask this question we often get just like no you're doing great it's cool that's completely useless I mean it makes you feel good for 5 seconds but it's not much not much use for growth so what do you do well ask specific questions it's important to be curious and mean it and that's something I've had to work on because I don't want to get told that I suck no nobody wants to get told that but if I try and frame it

in my own head as I genuinely want to be better I really want to know how I can achieve my job outcome in in a more exciting and Better Way um and it's okay to ask for a positive feedback here it's like hey I thought that went really well do you agree like uh I think it can be difficult because you're sort of shaping The Narrative a bit when you craft this question and making sure that your growth goal and the question are kind of in the same place as useful for me if someone asks me this question I might want to know why are you improving your technical writing skills in the first place I can give you some very specific feedback on your document but maybe that's not the conversation we should be having so think about framing it to get what you want out of that question something it's taken me a really long time to understand is this kind of I guess semi cliche feedback is a gift

that means a couple things to me it means I'm genuinely thankful for someone's showing me what's inside their head because if they are giving me that feedback then they're thinking that thing and they have chosen to tell me that so that I can choose whether or not I do something about it that is a gift even if it hurts even if it cuts you to your soul it's still a gift because they were thinking it anyway the other part of a gift is you can choose what to do with it I don't always use all the Christmas presents I get like I get that many but yeah there is a point where you're like no okay thank you I appreciate your point of view I acknowledge that that is how you feel and think I'm not going to change now it is useful to close that Loop Sometimes some people's feedback can be worded in ways that is uh open-ended maybe you should check out that course on C++ on on that website no I'm not going to thank you for the

gift why didn't you check out that course okay let's let's close a loop and be like you know what I'm I'm not going to do that because I've got these other priorities but it's also like it's your choice what you do with the feedback it's hard because my favorite slide vulnerability making yourself open to growth is hard it's hard to admit that I'm not perfect it's really hard to ask for help and this all ties up into impostor syndrome which is like the next talk in this room so I'm not going to derail myself but like it's it's very hard to get vulnerable especially somebody who has some kind of power feedback can confirm the stories we tell ourselves in the dead of night but I wanted to add my perspective as a manager onto this like one of my jobs as I pointed out earlier the big the middle one is to help you grow if I'm giving you some feedback

it's because I deeply care about you and I think that you can make that growth because if I don't care I'm not going to give you the feedback so I believe in you my feedback is a gift for that reason doesn't make it easy it's still really really hard but it makes it a little more bearable I suppose so let's talk about the ultimate feedback process yeah so it's March those of you in larger companies might have just had one of these congrats you made it through I I didn't know much about these for a long time actually even though I had these yearly meetings so I wanted to demystify a tiny bit this is a real company's Performance Cycle anonymized yours probably looks a bit like this if you have one please go find that out it is information you are entitled to have it's not secret a couple of takeaways from

this you have to write some kind of self-review in December cool I don't remember what I did last weekend it's March so by the time you get to December a lot of people just write really high level stuff or they write very recent stuff or both and I want to tell you how to kind of help yourself and write the best performance review that I've ever seen the other thing around this timeline is by the time it gets to March and you have that conversation hey you you had a good year you had an okay year whatever that's not the time to say okay but I want a promotion where is it that conversation happened month months ago the budget was set like you have to start the conversation for the next year's cycle and understand at your company whether promotions are something that have to happen at specific times or can happen at any time because that can be very different across companies in terms of having the best possible performance review ever

especially early in my career I kind of again obvious facts right but I didn't realize this I sort of thought my manager knew everything and that their job was to pull it all together and and write this thing we we are not we are only human we can't be in every place at once you have a better idea of what you've done and achieved than we do so the more that you can equip us to have a good set of information at the end of the year the better we can make your review that doesn't mean that we're just going to copy paste what you write there is kind of a a craft on top of that but you can have a lot more influence over your review than you might realize here are my two concrete tactics to make that awesome create two docs and write stuff down there's going to be a bit of a theme of writing stuff down I apologize so creating a running log of the stuff you do I like to do this weekly I set a calendar reminder on Fridays if you have an end of week ritual tack it onto that because it's easy to forget and and fall behind on this this but it's really important to do it especially if you can

capture the impact your work had while you remember it cool I did that bug it made a performance Improvement great awesome that actually saved the company money maybe it impacted retention numbers maybe it has some awesome reviews on the internet like Cate that when it happens because at the end of the year you can look back on that and be like wow like anybody at the end of the year can go back and look at CLS or commits or whatever but look at the impact and the why is a lot harder I also like to create a winds folder and a lot of people I spoke to do this as well this is more for your own use so the the done thing you can share with your manager if you want or you can keep it to write your performance review either is an option the winds folder is more private it's your own kind of list of brags of cool stuff that people have said about your work you can pull this through into the I did stuff side quite easily but it's also really nice as a a pickme up in a hard week uh to help you

when you're interviewing or just to remind you why you do your job when it's you know when you're in the trenches and everything's broken and you're just trying to get through the week these look a bit like this capture as much as you can don't make it an essay don't make it a chore or you'll stop doing it but please start doing it if you have the best performance review in the world you might be lucky enough to be thinking about promotion I will say promotion is not the only goal in life a lot of people like having more money so I like to talk about promotion but if you're not interested in it that's cool but for those of you that are your company probably has some kind of job ladder I'll get to what happens if it doesn't in a second this is a example of a a thing that Riot published a few years ago it's not active but it's kind of an example of hey at this level you need to do this kind of stuff at the next level you need need to do this kind of stuff and at

your company especially if it's a larger company this will be somewhere and you are entitled to this information you can look through this get an idea of how you're tracking against your current job and how you're tracking against the next one and then sounds simple right talk to your manager about it make it a collaborative question why haven't I been promoted Jeff got promoted you may be feeling that way I understand but it's easier to have this conversation if you approach it with collaborative mindset what would it take how do we get there together you start to plant the seed in your manager's head then maybe you could be promoted and if you're not having this conversation I guarantee you somebody who doesn't look like you probably is for the minorities in the room then you take that information you write it down you don't have to do this this oh there we go this is a a little overkill for some folks but it has been

needed at times where you're basically writing down what's called a gap analysis between your current level and the next level and capturing what you've done that shows you're at that level and what you're working on to get to that level now there are some extreme cases where you maybe are already at the next level and you're really feeling that hasn't been acknowledged in that case I recommend not starting with that previous question because if I if somebody asks me oh I'm I'm not at senior yet what do I have to do I'm sure I'll find something whereas if they say I think I'm at senior here's why it's just it's framing the conversation a little differently but hopefully you won't need that now what happens if you don't have one of those wonderful career ladders well there are some public ones you can start to look at you can reverse engineer job descriptions you can do my favorite thing in the world which is talk to people with the job you want uh and ask them what it takes to be a good senior engineer engineer lead artist whatever and then take that distilled

knowledge back to your manager and say hey I figured out that senior Engineers lead projects I'd like to lead a project that is I guess your manager is going to say oh it's very proactive of you it's really you're doing their job for them but if they're not doing it who cares about your career most you something else to know about promotions that I again thought my manager was kind of the celestial being for a really long time managers are not fairy godmothers I can't just wave the promotion stick and and get you all promotions I wish I could I really wish I could there's normally some kind of grand Council of wizards that meets and decides that so and so gets promoted so and so doesn't here's how many slots we have here what the budget is your manager is that in that room talking about you the more you can equip them with information with justifications and with Rock Solid arguments the better and that's kind of why I like having the the wins folder because it gives me a sense

of how people on the team think about me and see me it's very rare that we get out of our heads and remember that everything we see about our work is is not what anyone else sees and so when you're in that room being talked about somebody's going to remember that one thing that you said on slack that was a little bit offensive and the more you can do to shape that narrative the better so cool I want to be senior I want to lead a project let's talk about how to have that kind of conversation with your manager setting expectations I have personally been in the situation where what I thought my job was and what my manager thought my job was were different things and we did not talk about it until the performance review I am no longer at that company it did not go well for either of us having a conversation that's just as simple as here's what I'm doing here's what I'm spending my time on is really valuable if if you've just started a job and your like entry level maybe slightly

less needed but still a good habit to get into writing stuff out if you're split across different initiatives if you've got involvement in a diversity group or some other side projects make sure your manager knows about that and I recommend try not to ask what do I do try to say this is what I'm doing can I sense check it can I get your thoughts and give them a chance to collaborate with you but make it yours not theirs the more senior you are the more specific you might want to be here I like the okr format it's linked in my Dock at the end if you want to be like really clear on your responsibilities as a more senior person but as a more Junior person you don't need to overthink it but I do recommend you communicate a good time to do this is right after your performance review if you have one another good time to do any of the things in this talk is to say next week I just saw this talk at GDC let me jump off of that conversation

starter into a suggestion of how we work together better once you've set some kind of expectations of what you're doing it's also important that you don't just fire and forget managers can't be everywhere at once so how do you manage that from your seat think about your manager job for a minute which teams are they on which meetings are they in what do they see how much of your work is invisible to them I once had a performance review different job where my manager had no idea of the diversity work I was involved in and it was quite a big part of my work I had not learned from that previous situation I hadn't set my expectations properly but I just hadn't also thought that he doesn't see that so depending on where your manager is on the micromanagement to uh no management at tool Spectrum you can either ask them directly how do you want to keep updated or you can figure out okay they're too

busy but they're in these meetings I can be in those meetings too and trust me I've worked in infrastructure you can put infrastructure in the team Show and Tell next to the the new characters next to the the audio updates infrastructure belongs in those show and tells too and I won't say no for an answer on that one your manager is not the only person in your life you work with people every day you have people in your discipline that are a bit further away but know the compy you've got people that maybe look more like you than your manager I've had 15 managers and only one of them was a woman and I'm still kind of impressed that one of them was a woman in engineering trying to change that but there we go you can also get external cheer squad support from people outside your company because sometimes your company's really messed up and somebody outside needs needs to tell you that your manager will talk to these people for your review so have these kinds of conversations with them and make sure your manager knows who they are so you can get that big picture and again set yourself up for the best review

ever six of six one-on ones now you've probably got some kind of regular meeting with your manager they are your time what that means is your manager can talk but that you should get what you want out of them now one-on ones often look a bit like this especially after a long time with the same manager I see yeah for me too so that's great if that's what you want out of the time but really what this is is is an unqualified therapist giving you advice and stuff that sure you can talk about it but there's other ways to give the manager that information per my earlier slide there's a lot of other things you could be using this time for and your manager literally owes you these things it's their job they're there to help you connect you and grow you so as with any meeting that's gone off the rails a bit you can set an agenda I have a template for this but honestly it's kind of self-explanatory put a collaborative doc both add to it

and make sure that you use the time for that and if your manager is always running out of time to discuss that one thing that you really want to talk about schedule a one-off 30- minute meeting entitled Career Development conversation they can't escape if you do that you may have heard this piece of advice as well bring Solutions not problems now spiritually I do like this but I think it's a little overused so I want to rephrase it a bit what that phrase means is rather than saying hey I feel like you're undermining me a little bit you're not really giving me space to to grow into my seniority it means saying could you please just stop coming to those meetings I would really appreciate it and as a manager if you tell me what to do and tell me this will help me it's way more likely I'm going to do the thing that will help you than if you just say I'm feeling a kind of undermined by you I will probably try and think what that means and and do the wrong thing but sometimes what you need from your manager is a conversation it's

advice it's not a solution so really I'm just telling you how to communicate with some somebody else and in terms of the manager relationship you are entitled to ask your manager for what you need they want to help they may derail into giving you unnecessary advice or even mansplaining at you if you just give open-ended comments so the more you can shape that dialogue to what you actually need the better and I know it can be hard and sometimes scary to ask for this stuff but as I think I've said like a thousand times your manager is there to help and support you and it is their job fundamentally we're humans we take shortcuts and we will try and go through the shortest path of least resistance so the more that you can show us what that path looks like the better we can help and serve you because fundamentally we're all just humans we're all trying to do our best and I happen to be above you in the OR chart but I'm still just somebody who's going to make

mistakes almost at the end I've got a couple takeaways and then we will head straight out to the wrap-up room to continue the conversation hopefully you found your one thing from this talk that you're going to go do here's some ideas if you didn't ask your manager their priorities it's a great way to start getting all that wonderful context out of their head start tracking your work if you're not writing your work down please just do just just do it trust me and start thinking about that cheer squad and who is not in it that maybe should be maybe somebody in this room I asked all those wonderful people I mentioned for some final words of advice for this talk and this is what they said they actually said too much for me to fit in one slide so I distilled it fundamentally the overriding theme of them is like it will be all right I've given you a lot of information some of it's a little bit overwhelming scary maybe a bit awkward it will be all right and most of all find someone who you can trust at work even if that's not your manager especially if that's not your

manager final slide QR code resources there is a link on that page to submit new resources or feedback if you have any otherwise thank you all for listening have a wonderful GDC and I will see you [Applause] [Music] outside