I am often asked what I do for a living. When I mention that I am an engineering manager, most people nod their noses. Either they are unaware of the role or say: “You spend all your days in meetings”. So, I decided to write this article to demystify the engineering manager role.

What is the role of an EM?

Engineering managers are responsible for building, enabling and supporting high-performing teams that deliver quality and effective solutions at a sustainable pace. I am breaking down the responsibilities into five pillars: leadership, people management, collaboration, delivery and technical excellence.

Leadership

Acting as a leader is essential when managing people. The EM is responsible for setting clear objectives, inspiring people, creating a culture of trust and sharing the north start to ensure everyone is aligned and working towards the same strategic goal.

• People follow their leaders, so it is vital to act as a role model, breathe the company values and foster a culture of learning and development across the organisation.
• Enable the people around you to do their best work. As Andrew Grove mentions in his book High Output Management - “The output of a manager is measured by the output of their team and the people they influence.”
• Communicates effectively by creating empathy, transparency and clarity while shielding the team from noise.
• Values people. People are not resources. Ensure everyone is taking time off and no one works excessive hours. Caring about your team and their mental health is vital for a team to perform.
• Celebrate the team’s success by sharing releases and giving positive feedback. People should feel valued for their work.
• Build a strong relationship within your team. Plan regular team bonding activities.

People management

As the role’s name implicitly says, managing people is one of the fundamental responsibilities of an EM. Your job is to create a feedback culture and coach people to maximise their potential.

• Set regular 1 to 1’s with your direct reports. This meeting is an excellent opportunity to build stronger relationships, coach, give/receive feedback and set goals.
• Create a feedback culture where your team feels safe to share and receive feedback. Giving constructive feedback is one of the best ways to grow and ensure everyone is aligned.
• Build a psychologically safe environment where your team is comfortable making decisions and taking risks without fear of failure. Learn from it by doing retrospectives and post-mortems.
• Supports the development of the direct reports, ensuring everyone is growing and improving through regular 1:1s, coaching, performance reviews and goal setting.
• Owns the team hiring pipeline, anticipating and identifying hiring needs. Participates in technical and non-technical interviews.

Collaboration

The EM must collaborate with various teams in the organisation to build relationships and create a network that helps the team succeed. The relationships can include engineering or non-engineering teams such as product, sales, marketing or external teams (clients).

• Work with other EMs to improve or create new processes to benefit the organisation. e.g. Improve the incident management or hiring process.
• Identify dependencies and collaborate with the respective teams to create a joint plan to avoid the unexpected.
• Lead cross-initiatives by updating all the stakeholders, facilitating meetings, resolving conflicts and aligning the work.
• Partner with the Product manager to understand the customer’s needs and align with the team.

Delivery

The EM must ensure that the team operates efficiently, creates impact, and delivers quality value that aligns with the company’s strategy.

• The EMs must determine how and when the team delivers the OKRs. They are responsible for defining the best processes to work as an efficient team by owning the agile management process (planning, retrospective, and refinement) to ensure everything goes as planned.
• Accountable for delivering the OKRs. This must include creating a plan, prioritisation, capacity planning, identifying dependencies, setting initiatives and breaking down the work.
• Plan with the Product Manager and the leadership team the quarterly OKRs that align with the company strategy, factoring product and technical objectives.
• Monitor the team performance using quantitative and qualitative data:
  • The DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recover and change failure rate) measure the team’s delivery performance. It helps to spot improvement areas in the delivery process and make decisions based on data, not assumptions. For example, it can detect if the cycle time is high due to a bottleneck of the same person reviewing the code. The idea is to use these metrics to start discussions to improve the processes and not evaluate people.
  • The SPACE framework consists of collecting data from the SPACE areas (satisfaction, performance, activity, communication and collaboration, efficiency) using a survey-based tool from the engineers. They are the ones doing the work and dealing with daily challenges. Collecting their feedback is crucial for identifying areas of improvement. As a manager, you must run a retrospective meeting and create an improvement plan. The idea is to run these surveys quarterly and track the progress over time.

Technical Excellence

Despite being a management role, the EM must champion high-quality software, prioritise technical work and share a technical vision with the team.

• Advocates for engineering principles and best practices to ensure services are clean and maintainable.
• Make pragmatic decisions and balance delivery speed vs tech debt.
• Facilitates technical discussions, guaranteeing everyone is aligned and in agreement. During these discussions, it’s essential to challenge the team’s solution and consider everyone’s opinion (safe and open environment).
• The EM should contribute to high-level technical decisions to ensure the solution is scalable, evolutionary and aligned with the product requirements. Since they are more exposed across the organisation, they can help identify patterns other teams have solved and reuse the solution instead of reinventing the wheel.
• Accountable for tracking operational metrics and product KPIs. For example, ensure the services respect the SLAs agreed with clients (e.g. availability and latency), infrastructure costs, etc.

In conclusion, the role of an engineering manager is crucial in ensuring that technical teams deliver high-quality work and achieve their goals. Effective engineering managers are essential for creating a positive, productive work environment and driving innovation and growth within an organisation. Remember, the role of an engineering manager is not only to manage the team but to lead the team, to bring the best out of them, and to help them achieve their goals.