Engineering Management Academy

Glossary & Further Reading

Glossary

Every term of art used in this document, defined as this document uses it. Terms marked with a domain reference are developed fully in that competency.

30/60/90: framing a new hire's first quarter as explicit 30-, 60-, and 90-day outcomes (1.3).
Affinity bias: favouring people similar to yourself in evaluation; a structured-interview target (1.3).
Aligned autonomy: direction and boundary standards set centrally, methods left to teams (2.5, 4.3).
Altitude: the organisational scope at which judgment is exercised: Associate (a team), Professional (across teams), Expert (an organisation).
Architecture review forum: standing cross-team scrutiny of significant designs; advisory and educational, not a universal gate (4.1).
Blameless post-mortem: incident review focused on how the system allowed the failure and what to change, rather than who to blame (2.3, 5.1).
Bottom-up roadmap: a department "strategy" assembled from team wish lists, lacking a connecting thesis (3.1).
Brilliant jerk: a high performer whose behaviour violates team values; tolerating one teaches that results buy exemption (1.4, 5.5).
Bus factor: the number of people who could leave before critical knowledge or capability is lost; see key-person risk (2.4, 4.2).
Calibration: aligning evaluation standards across interviewers, managers, or organisations so the same performance earns the same judgment (1.3, 1.4).
Change failure rate: the proportion of deployments causing failures in production; a DORA stability metric (3.5).
Charter: the explicit statement of what a team or department owns; charter disputes are settled at the level that sets them (3.4).
Coaching vs. directing: developing someone's judgment through questions versus supplying the answer; the default and the exception, respectively (5.2).
Commitment (vs. estimate): what you promise externally, deliberately buffered, as distinct from your best forecast (2.2).
Cone of uncertainty: estimates are least accurate at a project's start and narrow as work is discovered (2.2).
Contract testing: automated verification of the agreement between a service and its consumers (2.4, 4.3).
Conway's Law: systems mirror the communication structures of the organisations that build them (4.1).
Core vs. context: build what differentiates the business; buy or adopt the commodity (3.4).
Cost of delay: value lost per unit time that work remains unshipped; the economic basis of sequencing (2.1).
Cycle time: how long work actually takes from start to done; the basis of historical forecasting (2.2).
DORA metrics: research-validated, team-level software-delivery measures: deployment frequency, change lead time, change failure rate, failed-deployment recovery time, rework rate (3.5).
Error budget: the tolerable shortfall against a service-level objective, treated as a spendable resource gating risk (2.3, 5.5).
Estimate range: a forecast expressed as a range with named assumptions, avoiding false precision (2.2).
Executive docket: the short list of technical decisions an executive personally owns rather than delegates (4.5).
Glue work: essential, under-recognised work that makes teams function: coordination, documentation, unblocking (5.3).
Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (3.5).
Growth ladder / competency matrix: explicit level descriptions making career progression concrete and comparable (1.5).
Halo effect: one impressive trait colouring an entire evaluation (1.3).
Incident command: a single coordination-and-communication owner during an incident, freeing responders to fix (2.3).
Intrinsic motivation: lasting motivation from autonomy, mastery, and purpose rather than external reward (5.4).
Inverse Conway manoeuvre: designing the organisation to induce the architecture you want (4.1).
Key-person risk: critical capability or context concentrated in one person; a dependency to engineer away (1.1, 2.4).
Learning zone: the combination of high psychological safety and high standards (5.1).
Office housework: necessary low-visibility tasks (notes, scheduling, coverage) that fall inequitably unless managed (5.3).
One-way / two-way door: irreversible versus reversible decisions; deliberate on the former, move fast on the latter (2.4, 4.5).
Operating cadence: the organisation's rhythm of planning, review, and escalation (2.5).
Outcome (vs. output): the change you want in the world, versus the thing you build (3.1).
Paved road: a well-supported default platform making the good path the easy path; teams may leave it at their own cost (4.3).
Portfolio governance: explicit ranking and limiting of concurrent initiatives at organisational scale (2.1).
Pre-mortem: assuming a plan has failed before starting and asking why; legitimised dissent (2.4).
Psychological safety: a shared belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (Edmondson; Project Aristotle) (5.1).
RACI: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed; a decision-ownership map (1.1, 2.4).
Rescuing: jumping in with the solution the moment someone struggles; the anti-pattern of coaching (5.2).
SBI (Situation-Behaviour-Impact): feedback anchored in a specific situation, observable behaviour, and its impact (1.2).
Situational leadership: flexing style (directing → coaching → supporting → delegating) to competence and confidence on the task (1.1).
Skip-level 1:1: a leader's regular 1:1 with their reports' reports; unfiltered signal, never a bypass (1.5).
SLO (service-level objective): an explicit reliability target from which the error budget derives (2.3).
Span of control: how many direct reports a leader can effectively serve; a function of context, not a constant (1.1).
Structured interview: consistent questions mapped to a rubric, scored independently before discussion (1.3).
Sunk cost: what has already been spent; argues for nothing in forward-looking decisions (3.4).
Task-relevant maturity: how much direction someone needs on a specific kind of task, independent of seniority (Grove) (1.1).
Technical debt: the implied future cost of an expedient choice; deliberate-prudent debt is a trade, reckless debt is mess (4.2).
Technical-debt quadrant: Fowler's classification of debt as deliberate/inadvertent × prudent/reckless (4.2).
Total cost of ownership (TCO): full lifetime cost of a capability: build plus maintenance, or price plus integration, lock-in, and exit (3.4).
Watermelon status: reporting that is green outside and red inside; a broken information system, not a broken team (2.4).
WIP limit: a cap on concurrent work so the most important things finish sooner (2.1).

Glossary & Further Reading

Glossary & Further Reading

Glossary

Further reading