Reading/Roles and responsibilities/Engineering Manager

Who am I?

I am Corey Floyd.

What do you do?

I am the The Apps Engineering Manger in the Reading vertical.

No, really - what do you do?

Ok - that is a pretty good question. In fact, it’s why I created this page. Partly to help those that I work with understand what I do, and partly so I understand what I do.

Below is pretty good layout of my goals, responsibilities and commitments. By writing this down I hope that anyone I work with will have clear expectations of what am doing day to day, and more importantly, how I can help them.

Ahh… pretty interesting, but shouldn’t you be doing X?

I’m glad you asked! it’s quite possible I should be doing something else. Or possible that I am doing something I shouldn’t be.

Like all wikis, this is a living document. If you see some gaps or overlap, let me know.

Ok, that’s great, can I just read it now?

Sure, just one more thing… if you need to reach me you can email me or find me on IRC (fjalapeno). And thanks for reading! 👋

Goals

These are the high level goals I would like to accomplish:

Align Technical and Product planning to improve the feature development process and reduce uncertainty
Increase collaboration of teams within Reading by working together on shared services and features
Establish and maintain collaborative relationships with other teams that develop and maintain the services and infrastructure on which we depend
Facilitate the adoption of new technologies developed by the WMF and the community into the Reading platforms
Reduce administrative and synchronization overhead of engineers, allowing them to be more productive
Maintain and improve quality of apps

Technical Responsibilities

The following are the responsibilities that generally make up my day to day activities:

Planning

Identify and manage dependencies across Reading teams
Coordinate meetings to manage dependencies and sync requirements across Reading and with external teams
Identify and understand new technologies developed within WMF and the community
Communicate benefits and costs of new technologies with Reading product managers to aide in product planning
Work with product managers to coordinate Reading team meetings
Develop technical plans to support and maintain services and infrastructure to support Reading platforms

Scheduling and Road Mapping

Coordinate development and deployment schedules of services and product features among teams
Maintain Phabricator board of feature epics across Reading platforms linking and tracking related work
Maintain a roadmap for Reading maintained services
Assist Reading product managers in Quarterly planning (focused on features with service and/or external dependencies)

Technical Requirements

Gather product requirements from Reading product managers and work with Reading Tech Leads to generate technical requirements
Document technical requirements
Sync technical requirements across Reading platforms (Android/iOS/Mobile Web/Desktop Web) and with Reading Infrastructure
Sync technical requirements with external teams which share dependencies (e.g. Services, Research, Discovery)

Code Quality

Coordinate with Tech Leads and/or product managers to ensure:

Technical debt is managed and prioritized
Regression testing is up to date and maintained
Tasks are automated when possible
Crash rates are kept below acceptable levels

Development

Code Review as needed / when possible
Service development as needed / when possible

Line Manager Responsibilities

In addition to my technical responsibilities, I also work with the Engineers on the Apps Team to accomplish the following:

Aid in professional development
Make sure engineers maintain a healthy work-life balance
Provide Performance Reviews
Hold 1-1s to discus these topics

Regular Meetings

Below are the meetings I regularly attend:

Team Meetings

Android Iteration Review (bi-weekly)
iOS Product Planning (weekly)
Reading Infrastructure Team Weekly (weekly)
Combined Apps Standup (weekly)
iOS Retrospective (bi-weekly)
Android Retrospective (bi-weekly)
Tech Lead Meeting (weekly)

Sync meetings

Revscoring Sync (Research, weekly)
Reading API/Services Sync (Services, weekly)
Reading Services Sync (Bernd, weekly)
Apps Product Manager Sync (iOS product manager, Android product manager, bi-weekly)

1-1s

1-1s with each Apps Engineer (every 1-3 weeks)
1-1 with Apps Product Manager (weekly)
1-1 with Reading Engineering Director (weekly)
1-1 with Senior Director, Head of Reading (bi-weekly)