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Curling - An Engineering Management story
Drawing inspiration from an icy sport
ARJUN RAO
February 21, 2024
I have always thought Curling is a great analogy for Engineering Management. I won’t go into the details of Curling itself, because it is surprisingly more complicated than I had expected it to be. However, topically I will use analogies to convey how I think of Curling and Engineering Management in the same sphere.
A curling team consists of four players trying to ensure that the stone they are responsible for reaches a certain part of the very long strip of specially prepared ice called a Sheet. Roughly, the responsibility of two of the players is as follows :
1. One of the players I will call the Sweeper (sic) because they are responsible for Sweeping (official term) — the idea of sweeping is to gently warm the surface of the ice where the stone will glide across.
2. The other player is responsible for setting down the stone on the trajectory that they expect the stone to land on. I shall call this position the “Shooter” (sic).
For folks curious about Curling — this gets a bit more complicated based on who acts as the shooter. The playing positions are commonly known as Lead, Second, Third and Fourth. The lead is the player who delivers the first two stones. The second plays the third and fourth stones. The third plays the fifth and sixth stones and the fourth plays the last two stones. Skips usually play fourth, but that’s not essential.
The way I think about it, the Sweeper is the Engineering Manager and the Shooter is the Individual Contributor. When the Shooter sets down the stone, it is the Sweeper who needs to ensure there are no obstacles for the stone to successfully deliver to its destination. The Sweeper does this by rubbing away any obstacles on the sheet and warming up the ice so that the stone glides smoothly to its target.
What the Sweeper does here is not unlike the work of an Engineering Manager. One of my primary responsibilities as an Engineering Manager is to be a “Human Debugger”. What this means is that I need to ensure I understand what makes my team tick and what makes them not perform to the best of their abilities. That will involve at times ensuring I am able to create the right environment, provide them with the right tools, and let them have adequate runway they need to be able to execute their tasks without any distractions.
The analogy is not perfect, but it is a helpful way to think about how to set up your direct reports for success.
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