At the time of writing, I’m about 4 months into the journey as an Engineering Manager. A question that I’ve been trying to find ways to answering is, “What are the skill and capacity need of my team today and what are they likely to be tomorrow?”
After ~a quarter of a year in this role, I’ve managed to skate by by constraining the definition of “tomorrow” to “next quarter”. But what I think will really set a team up for long term success is to shift that definition of “tomorrow” from just one or quarters ahead to one or two years ahead.
My goal here is to outline the processes of developing a Team Growth Strategy.
What is the purpose of your team? This is the “meta why” - what you are asking for are more resources; why you are asking is to be able to build more awesome things more quickly; why you want to build those awesome things is to fulfill the vision of your team. This is useful context to set for your audience (and yourself) as you go about these conversations.
Does it make sense to ask for more resources if you don’t know what you’d do with them? Having a well defined roadmap of initiatives is a prerequisite for being able to thoroughly think through staffing needs.
A “well defined” road map, for this purpose, is one in which
Use past data about similar work, if available, to come up with course gained estimates for each initiative. These don't need to be scientific. No need to drill down to the level of project milestones.
The cumulative output of roadmap + estimates is be useful context to share with stakeholders.