Engineering Management Tools: My Top Picks

Engineering managers have a different workflow than ICs (individual contributors), and though we often use the same tools, their layout and integration into our workflow are different.

Calendar

The most essential tool is the calendar, and Google Calendar is great. As a manager, creating recurring events such as daily standups or bi-weekly sprint planning meetings is standard.

Creating and subscribing to multiple calendars is a good feature. Depending on the number of projects and teams, creating a separate calendar for recurring events can make sense. Many organizations have a separate calendar for engineering department meetings and presentations. Any meetings affecting multiple departments or teams within a department could be on a shared calendar. Office hours are another candidate for a shared calendar across the organization. Multiple shared calendars are useful in keeping the main calendar manageable.

For ICs, setting up “focus time” in the calendar is a good way to let engineering managers know when they can schedule meetings to avoid interrupting focused work time. Subscribing to multiple calendars is also great for keeping track of holidays and out-of-office time, which can affect capacity planning and on-call schedules.

Tasks, to-dos

There are many task management and to-do list tools out there. Previously, I used Todoist for task management and tried out a few different tools. The best to-do list is close to the other tools you use for managing a team. If you live in Google Calendar, then Google Tasks is a good choice since it integrates directly into the calendar, and like calendars, you can create multiple to-do lists. You can set tasks to repeat, a good reminder that appears in the calendar without taking up a block of time. Tasks are a good reminder for various preparation work for project planning and roadmapping.

Notes

For short-form notes, what I’ve found works best is using whichever tool is available. If I’m in a meeting on Google Meet or looking at the calendar, I can use Google Keep for notes. If I’m in a Slack huddle or see something in a channel or thread that I want to write a note about, I use the “Direct Message to self” feature of Slack as a note-to-self. I use Notion or Obsidian for long-form notes or for turning short notes into long-form ones. Writing notes and creating links between them is very useful. The links between notes make it easy to refer to past notes about meetings or additional notes about documents.

One of my workflows involves using Slack and Notion. I use Slack for a short summary that can be copied/pasted to various channels and threads and Notion for a longer-form note with more details that I rewrite later for different formats (e.g., a technical spec, engineering brief, a company-wide presentation, or during a 1:1). The same applies to Teams, Google Docs, or other tools.

1:1s and Career Goals

Lattice is incredible for this. The software formalizes what’s usually in spreadsheets or in document templates. For 1:1s, I encourage ICs to add topics; it’s a checklist to ensure we cover each topic. There’s also a checklist of “action items” for the IC and myself to ensure we follow up with concrete actions based on our conversations. Another great feature is the career track and career goals. The org can set up the templates for the career track, and I can work with an IC to turn those into specific goals. Lattice makes it far easier to collaborate with an IC on their goals and to ensure there’s accountability from myself and the IC on accomplishing things that not only move the company or projects forward, they move the IC forward in their career.

Diagrams

Lucidchart and Drawio are great diagramming tools. Lucidchart has many great templates to use as starting points, such as user journeys, use case diagrams, sprint retrospectives, roadmaps, and cloud architecture diagrams. Drawio also contains many great templates and can be downloaded locally. I primarily use Drawio for engineering architecture diagrams.

Both Lucidchart and Drawio can be used for quickly sketching out diagrams. The user interfaces are well-designed. Lucidchart has a good collaboration mode, where you can share a diagram and build it out with your team.

SQL Database and Codebase Tools

JetBrains suite for professionals — from IntelliJ IDEA to PyCharm to DataGrip, each tool makes it easy for engineering managers to explore and understand a code base, data models, and database schema. I use IntelliJ IDEA to get up to speed on a codebase by searching the code or clicking through to see the usage and definitions of methods and classes. The integrated debugger works great for Python and Ruby codebases, and the autocomplete and code navigation for TypeScript codebases are fantastic.

The database tools in JetBrains IDEs allow you to connect to various data sources, from DynamoDB to PostgreSQL to ClickHouse to Redis and SQLite. The tool lets you run queries and edit records and rows within the editor, which is good for checking data and modifying it during testing. It’s also possible to sort, filter, and search the data locally and to compare data.

While there are other database tools, having an integrated database viewer in your IDE that sits beside the code that creates and updates that data is very useful.

Password Management

1Password and Bitwarden are solid choices for password management. Both feature vaults that can be shared with team members and across departments. They both feature SSO, which enables your IT department to control access to the vaults. Bitwarden is also open source, with the core code licensed under the GPL. For software engineers, IT, and DevOps, the CLI, and APIs offered by 1Password and Bitwarden allow for the automation of secrets management and vault management.