So you're an engineering manager for the first time, and you've got to figure out how to run a pay review process. This is easy to screw up and, if you do, you will make lots of people unhappy. I want to show you the simplest, most defensible, way to allocate pay rises to staff. I need a cool name, so I'm going to call it The STEVE Protocol.
I had a conversation with a friend today who is fairly new to engineering management, and struggling with the usual set of problems. One thing he mentioned in particular was "it's hard for me to make space in our delivery cycle for us to deliver technical improvements".
I'm not an expert here by any means, but I think we do this pretty well at CarbonRe.
There are three sub-problems here: who gets to decide what work is delivered, how do we define technical work in the first place, and how do we effectively prioritise when there's too much stuff to do.