Leading an Engineering team at Rappi
Hi, I’m Eduardo Echeverria, Senior Engineering Manager of the Restaurant Operation squad at Rappi. In this article, I’d like to introduce to our readers what this role means within the organization and a bit of how my daily routine looks like.
How do I contribute to Rappi?
Each company determines what is an engineering manager within its specific context and is not different at Rappi. My job is focused on supporting my teams all the way to the individual level, establishing a good team dynamic, setting up the strategy of how we’ll deliver on our objectives, and build out a career plan for them to evolve both at their career as well as in terms of their contributions to the team.
In short, I’m responsible for the team at the strategy level. To succeed at this, I need to work closely with three edges, product, technology, and most importantly, the people within the team.
Product
I work closely with the product managers of my teams to align expectations and set a high bar on what and how technical decisions could affect positively and negatively our systems when building out the flows. To achieve this we’ve created a methodology to build roadmaps that address the main objectives of the business while balancing out when and how to pay technical debt.
I don’t necessarily have to agree with every decision on the product discussion but I need to support them and listen and understand the whys. I give my advice when critical product pieces are being discussed, so that I can influence the product’s implementation to achieve a correct balance between quality/scalability/reliability and feasibility.
Last but not least, we work together periodically to review how our main KPIs are performing, so that we make sure that we are delivering our client’s success, which in our case is the restaurants.
Technology
As a manager, developing software is no longer your role, for that, I have a great team that is responsible for the execution of the technical solutions. However, I always try to use my experience to challenge choices and decisions in scalability, security, and reliability and proposing alternative solutions, frameworks in my areas of expertise but not forcing or pressuring them to accept them.
I work closely with my Engineering Leads and Technical Referents to make sure we have set the right engineering processes, prioritizing the tech backlogs when needed, and estimating well the tech and product stories. For each estimation, we do a rigorous technical breakdown of each task that we need to execute, we do this every single time a sprint starts.
Another key piece of my work is to have the right technical metrics and resources to avoid downtimes, which would result in bad service to our partners. As a result, we’ve build monitoring metrics to check out injected orders, cancellations, and availability of our restaurants, which we follow closely to make sure they stay stable or for further ways to improve them.
People
My main task as an engineering manager is that to try to identify the better skills of each person within the team and supercharge their strengths more than try to fix their weaknesses. Managing is not parenting, that means I’m direct with my team and speak frankly on what we need to fix and improve but always taking into account that all of them are adults and professionals, so I try to lead with empathy and focused on the big picture rather than on the minor situations.
I also try and make my team as effective as possible, removing noise from external meetings where they are not expected to attend, like commercial or operations problems as well as those related to high-level product definitions.
Finally, I work heavily in knowing what are the career expectations of my teams, what they need to learn, and how the organization and I can help them gain this knowledge so they can be better engineers.
To summarize, I try to build a culture of emotional safety where the team can make decisions without fear of failure and where the senior members of the team can help enhance the work of others.
What does a typical day look like?
I start to work at 9 am, my first meetings are the daily meetings of my teams. We are fully remote so they are based all over Latin America: Colombia, Argentina, México, and Ecuador to name a few countries. Afterwards, I review the main issues I need to address, these are usually important bugs to assign or defining a future implementation. Later on, I re-connect with the teams via Slack or meetings if necessary regarding technical discussions or roadblocks.
I always try to solve/assign/align/delegate the most impactful problems during the day and make sure minor issues are in a queue. I do this to avoid being overwhelmed myself with minor stuff.
An important part of my day is used in recurrent calls, having meetings with stakeholders, engineering leads, product managers, and 1:1s with my direct reports.
Some days, I work on the hiring pipeline collecting and reviewing profiles that can be part of our Rappi Engineering teams.
It’s important for me to continue to learn and so I spend a piece of my day reading articles on management and tech so that I keep up to date. Usually, I spend at least one hour of my time to do this.
Finally, I always try to have active pauses to avoid fatigue and keep healthy.
What are your biggest challenges?
The biggest challenge in our area is to make sure the restaurants have the correct tools to improve their operation.
Many of our products have been built taking into account the direct feedback of what our partners needs, products such as our Public API have been the result of several conversations between engineering, business, and operation teams who have done their bit giving their best ideas about how restaurants should operate.
Because of that we always look for feedback from our partners to improve periodically our tools and platform, improving our product ideation framework, and our platform architecture.
About me
I started my software development career in 1997, I’m a free software contributor in the Fedora Project, I love reading Reddit and Hacker News, while I’m not working I watch Youtube and Netflix series or playing video games, and my favorite Youtube channels are What if, El Robot de Platon, Linus tech tips, marques Brownlee among others, I’m a crazy fan of the MCU and DCEU and my favorite movie line ever is “May the force be with you”
