Engineering Management Glossary

Planning and Execution

• Execution: Execution is the process of carrying out a plan. For engineering managers, it's about the "how" of completing a project.

• Agile: Agile methodology is an iterative approach to building projects that involves back-and-forth cycles between creating and building products, sending them to the customer, and getting feedback to improve and plan for the next cycle.

• Scrum: Scrum is a specific instance of Agile methodology that involves sprints where cycles of project development are completed in a 1-2week timeframe iteratively.

• Kanban: Kanban charts, popularized by the company Trello, are ways of organizing projects into cards and columns, similar to post-it notes. They're often used in Scrum/Agile project planning processes with columns like "To-do", "Doing" and "Done."

• Gantt Chart: Gantt charts are a timeline chart to help map out projects over long time scales. Gantt charts are particularly effective to map out several dependencies between various projects or complicated timelines.

• Sprint: Sprints are a unit in a scrum process that involves a set number of bugs/tasks and clear roles and responsibilities to complete them in a certain time interval.

• Milestone: Milestones are often used by engineering managers to break up large, complicated projects into smaller, approachable chunks with clearer deadlines. This can be an effective concept to bring up in interviews asking about project planning.

• Retro(spective): Retrospectives are check-ins, usually at the end of a sprint or project, where the team reflects on what went well and what could be improved about the process. These are important moments to gather feedback and improve the management of the team.

• Waterfall: Waterfall method of development is a now less-frequently used form of software development that involves a linear approach to software development (unlike Agile). Generally, the process starts with product requirements, then goes to design, implementation, and finally maintenance.

• OKR: OKRs stand for Objectives & Key Results. OKRs are a planning tool to set clear objectives (what you are trying to get to) and key results (how you know you have gotten there). This can help anchor the team on a clear vision and ensure team alignment on goals.

• KPI: KPIs stand for Key Performance Indicators. KPIs are helpful to set clear measurable goals for projects. An example KPI might be increasing conversion rates by 5% by EOY. KPIs are helpful to give the team a clear sense of their goal.

• Technical debt: Technical debt is sort of like the room that you haven't cleaned in a while, and now it's harder to find things in it. While coding quickly can be effective, it usually builds up "debt" that requires maintenance to clean and maintain so that future projects can be built effectively.

• Feature creep: This happens when a scoped-down feature is being developed, and then slowly over time, the feature becomes bigger and bigger, usually because of input and thoughts from the team. Often, an engineering manager should find a way to reduce feature creep to keep the team focused.

• Scope: Scope is the intended size and cost of a project. For instance, a project may be scoped down to a week's time of one engineer.

• Dependency: Dependencies often exist in engineering planning, where one project or person's work may depend on another's being completed. Effective planners know how to plan around dependencies to reduce blockage.

Managing Individuals

• Individual contributor (IC): Individual contributors refer to team members who aren't managing others, and instead are focused on outputting work themselves.

• Performance review: A performance review is the process where feedback is given to a team member, usually alongside a "level" or rating of performance. These sessions are also opportunities for promotion.

• Career levels: Career levels, sometimes referred to as a career "ladder," are a company's way of articulating the different stages of an employee's scope and experience.

• Performance improvement plan (PIP): A performance improvement plan is a set of guidelines and expectations that a team member should reach to be an effective member of the team. PIPs are usually given to team members when they are consistently underperforming.

• Diversity: Diversity is about the presence of differences in a team, such as race, gender, sexuality, and more.

• Equity: Equity is about ensuring justice and fairness across diverse teams and acknowledgment of how differences may play into societal disparities.

• Inclusion: Inclusion is about ensuring the diverse set of people in a team feel welcome, included, and invited.

• Headcount: Headcount is a term for how many direct reports a manager has bandwidth and budget for.

• Escalation: An escalation is when a team member decides to involve their manager to help unblock them with a decision or issue.

Roles

• Technical lead (TL): A technical lead on a project is the directly responsible individual to ship a particular project. TL's can be managers or senior IC engineers on a team.

• Site reliability engineer (SRE): A site reliability engineer is the person responsible for ensuring the website reduces downtime, and often handles issues with deployment.

• Technical Program Manager (TPM): The TPM often helps with the "how" of product development, including setting timelines and running meetings to reach milestones.

• Product Manager (PM): The PM helps with the "why" of product development, and helps with defining product requirements and deciding the priority of building features.

• Product Designer: Product designers design the look and user experience of a product.

• Product Analyst: Product analysts view the user data of a product and create recommendations for the product team on priorities.

• QA Engineer: QA engineers test the finalized product to ensure there are minimal bugs and issues.

For a list of system design concepts, see our system design glossary.