As an engineering manager, do you ever feel like you're dying a slow death by a thousand cuts? All those little tasks that keep falling in your lap can be overwhelming. At Social Tables, we've started giving every engineer a "Hat" to wear for this very reason.

1. HATS ARE
THE NEW
LEADERSHIP
Ed Kim
Social Tables
@edwardjkim

2. First, Some Background...

3. We Have a Flat Team
VP,
Engineerin
g
Lead
Engineer
Engineer
(x8)

4. Shown Another Way...
VP
ENGINEERING
LEAD
ENGINEER
ENGINEER ENGINEER ENGINEER ENGINEER ENGINEER ENGINEER
ENGINEER ENGINEER
At 2 hours/wk/eng
9 x 2 = 18 hours per week
doing manager-related tasks!

5. It’s All the “Little” Things!
● Assigning the next blog post and
proofreading
● Making sure ALL bug reports get addressed
FAST
● Picking a leader for our company-wide
update
● Publishing content updates to WWW
● Organizing code reviews
● Scheduling Lunch & Learns

6. TIME FOR
HATS!

7. The Blog Master Hat
https://medium.com/social-tables-tech

8. The Blog Master Hat
https://medium.com/social-tables-tech

9. The Bugs Captain Hat
● Assigns first responder in our bugs chat
room
● Monitors response quality and provides
backup
● Thinks about improving communication
between Engineering and Customer

10. The Bugs Captain Hat

11. The Architect Hat
● “Professional whiteboarder”
● Stands in in on technical scoping meetings
● Provides guidance on high-level code & data
architecture

12. The Marketing Hat
● Handles all content updates to non-application
pages (home page, marketing
pages, team page)
● Leads custom landing page builds
● Tracking pixels & integrations with marketing
automation software (e.g. Pardot)

13. The Education Hat
Lunching & learning
about WebGL and the
graphics rendering
pipeline. These things
don’t organize
themselves!

14. And This Works for Big
Things!
● Product Ownership for Main Application
● New Employee Onboarding & Mentoring
● API
● Dev Ops
Get it? Linux
joke!
And...Technical Leads for New Products!

15. Thanks!
Ed Kim
Social Tables
@edwardjkim