Engineering Manager role¶
Work in progress
An entry level management role adopted by engineers moving away from deep technical responsibilities towards people support.
The role naturally focuses on the larger goals and challenges facing engineering teams, supporting the engineers to solve specific challenges using their own skills and experiences (that is why they were hired after all)
The essence of the role is to ensure engineers:
- understand the responsibilities the company expects of them.
- have the information and tools required to work effectively
- support the growth of engineers
Expectations may vary widely company to company
The EM role can vary wildly across companies. I have worked for some teams were I was hands-on coding each day, with other teams there were so many other priorities I never had chance to look at the code.
Establishing what you percieve as the role scope within your organisation & team is important. This must be aligned with the expectations of your manager.
Without a shared and clearly defined remit then expectations easily go unmet, leading to a poor outcome for all.
When the scope is diverse, communicate the aspects you will focus on each month (each week if its a chaotic or 'high-pressure' environment).
Personality Traits¶
The role works for the team so personal ego should not be an influencing factor.
A strong ego is counterproductive to an effective team and prevents other members from engaging.
Supportive leadership encourages all members of the team to become fully involved in decisions and actions, sharing in the sense of ownership and responsibility.
Meetings¶
Regular meetings with the team is the foundation to building high-trust relationships.
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direct reports focus on supporting that persons ability to thrive within the company and identify actions to help
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stakeholders to ensure their concerns are understood and they have a realistic view of current capability from engineering teams
Each member of the team should be supported to drive their one to one with their manager, driving their own agenda that supports career and personal growth.
Collective team meetings should be highly focused to avoid waste, deciding on actions and identifying were further discussion is required
- standup can highlight issues with motivation and team cohesiveness
- retrospective identify action items that the engineering manager can actively support or help direct others to support
Performance reviews supported by one-to-one meetings
Where performance reviews are applicable, include the review as an aspect to raise with one-to-one meetings with direct reports throughout the year.
The need to complete a review should be raised as early as possible in one-to-one meetings and regularly raised (even if only briefly) to ensure supporting tasks are carried out to swiftly complete the review at the appropriate time.
Creating regular journal entries can speed up the completion of a self-written performance review submission
Journal¶
Write regular journal entries and encourage others to do the same by sharing the journal across the organisation (except for private notes)
Use the knowledge sharing tool for the organisation, e.g. Atlassian Confluence, 
Notion, Tettra, etc.
Example Journals
Practicalli personal journal is a purposely unstructured journal to capture important but ad-hock information quickly, in a central place to it can easily be found and added too.
Management anti-patters¶
micro-management is highly ineffective, demonstrates lack of trust, highlights poor communication and lack of management skills. Shows lack of understanding of the needs of the business and engineering teams.
overt control suggests a lack of confidence, demoralises the team, incurs a lack of trust and engagement by team under control. Drives inefficiency, stifles agency and creativity.
emotional pain degrading and emotionally attacking a person has no place in a positive relationship.
dominating by tearing people down to (allegedly) build them up in the (perceived) right way is an act of emotional torture and highly counter productive in the long term.
Working with Product Owners¶
Important relationship for effective delivery, working on the most valuable work at the right time.
Ensures the work is readily understandable by the engineers on the team.
There should be clear goals to achieve (e.g. milestones) and a common understanding of what DONE looks like (and how to demonstrate DONE).
Fintech Startup
- wrote a pitch to enhance API security by introducing HTTP Message Signatures (RFC9421)
- reviewed and help simplify pitches created by the product manager, e.g. a new billing system and authorisation permissions and roles
- introduced concept of engineering pitches to address technical debt and engineering concerns, expressing the value of this work to the business and ensuring the most concerning technical debt was alieviated
Avoid solutionising
Product requirements should avoid providing a solution, focusing on on the what and why but not the how.
A solution can prevent discussion and lead engineers down an inappropriate approach.
For example: Product suggested an API approach to an intricated billing system for a high volume service. All the API's were listed and so the only action was to create the relevant code.
The API approach did not factor in the significant performance degredation it would cause to the current system, especially for end-of-day batch processing tasks.
The proposed solution would not have performed effectively and would have had a detrimental impact on the overall service provided to customers.
A busy engineering team may have adopted this approach rather than seeking out existing services they could build a service upon (i.e. an existing ledger service).
Responsibilities¶
The Engineering Manager is ultimately responsible for everything the team does and agrees to do
- delivery of all work agreed
- Health and wellbeing of team
- Carrer progression of team members
- Onboarding new team members
- Rolling off new team members
- Overall quality of the platform
- Overall schedule of the team and meetings they attend
Product Manager¶
Ultimately responsible for providing clear guidance on business features and priorities. The "What" and "When" from the stakeholder point of view.
- The Product owner should be aware of the respective value of any work proposed and any time frame in which this value is constrained by.
- Why is it valuable, compared to other business features
- When is it valuable
Work Cadence¶
Short term cycle provides fast feedback, reducing wasteful work.
- 4 weeks product driven work
- 2 weeks engineering driven work
- Introduce goal keeper concept (based on need - initially engineering managers sole responsibility)
Planning View¶
Long term plan matches the overal vision of the organisation at a high level.
Short term detailed plan to ensure focus on delivery.
- 3 month high level goals
- 1 month plan overview (one or more milestones)
- 1 week detailed work (prioritised by stakeholder feedback each week)
Priorities for product driven and engineering driven work agreed at start of each week.
- Work broken down to small pieces, 1 day to 1 week.
- Epics used to orchestrate larger pieces of work.