What is your job as a technical software team manager? How can a top performing individual contributor transition into technical leadership? Many more in-depth articles and books have been written, so in this article I’ll briefly cover what I think makes a successful Technical Engineering Manager.

To maximize the value of remote work, each team member should focus on maximizing the time spend on Core Work, ensure that Communication is efficient and utilize the most efficient tools and systems for everything else.

I’ve pieced together this guide for my own team from a number of articles I’ve read over the past 10 months. If you are interested in creating a guide for your team, I strongly encourage you to read the source material and customize a guide that works for your team.

Slack is a powerful tool, but if used incorrectly it can become a huge distracting mess.

One of the primary goals of good Slack use is to expose as many conversations publicly for both collaboration and information purposes. By leveraging public channels, and composing longer easier to scan messages you can minimize follow-up questions and increase team awareness.

Second, to maximize focus for the distributed team, you should prioritize asynchronous communication and minimize message notifications. By batching messages, using discussion threads, and replacing short responses with emoji reactions you can dramatically reduce notifications and enable you and your team to focus on higher priority core work.

In his 2007 book “The Dip” Seth Godin writes that “Smart people quit all the time..” what they don’t do is give up on a strategy. The idea is that while you pursue a worthy goal (strategy), you need to remain flexible in your approach (tactics).

Though the book is primarily targeted at entrepreneurs, it contains a lot of wisdom about the journey from mediocrity to excellence. The Dip is a perfect metaphor for everything from your career to individual problems you may tackle.