You’ve just been promoted to an engineering management role. What do you need to know?

As an Engineering Manager one has to be a very dynamic and pleasant personality. Other than technical capabilities an Engineering manager has to manage every team member of his team by any means. He has to understand everyone's psychology whether the person is an engineer or a technician or fitter. He needs to be in good control over his teammates.

1. Communication claire et précise : Les managers en ingénierie doivent communiquer clairement pour éviter les malentendus et garantir la compréhension des objectifs et des taches, en utilisant un langage simple et en clarifiant rapidement les ambigu?tés. 2. écoute active et empathie : L'écoute active et l'empathie sont cruciales pour les managers en ingénierie. Ils doivent créer un environnement où chacun se sent écouté et respecté, ce qui renforce la confiance et favorise la collaboration. 3. Communication transversale et gestion des conflits : essentielle pour les managers en ingénierie. Ceci assure une bonne communication entre départements, gèrent les conflits de manière constructive pour un environnement de travail harmonieux.

1. Build genuine trust and relationships with people, especially *across* the org - not just up and down the management chain. Venture outside your comfort zone and reach out to Infrastructure teams, Cyber Security teams, Agile PMO, Network Operations team etc. & not just other engineering teams. 2. In today's world, no engineering lead is worth their salt, if they don't know about Cyber Security and Core Networking concepts, these are table-stakes as we navigate through wildly complex deployments across cloud, hybrid and on-prem environments for both our own and vendor-owned infrastructure. 3. Know your best talent (even if it is way down the hierarchy) and find ways to challenge, motivate, grow and rightfully, retain them.

If you do nothing else, setup a regular cadence of communication with your stakeholders and stick to an agenda... positive or negative information shared is worth more than a lack of information

Now that you're an engineering manager, keeping your tech skills sharp is key. You don't have to out-code everyone, but understanding what your team is up to and guiding them is essential. Stay on top of new trends and tools, and push your team to explore and try new things. Keeping your own skills fresh matters too—code a bit, review others' work, hit the books, and join some webinars or courses. It’s about leading by example and fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.

As an Engineering Manager, it's crucial to keep growing both technically and managerially. To train and retain skillful engineers, you must have strong knowledge of new technologies and provide technical guidance as needed. This not only helps assess feasibility but also evaluate options to deliver high-quality work. Effective leaders empathize with the team, understand their pain points and solve challenges collaboratively. Foster a culture of continuous learning with team growth opportunities.

Stepping into this leadership position, it's vital to motivate and uplift your team. Chart a course that aligns with the organization's objectives, fostering an atmosphere of collaboration and creativity. Task delegation, mentoring, celebrating achievements, and managing issues are key. Enhance your leadership by embracing feedback, reflecting on your approach, observing experienced leaders, and maybe getting a mentor. Aim to create an environment where support, motivation, and excellence are the norms.

Leadership is very important to run businesses and makes it growing year over year. To manage people is different from managing entities and we should be care of this point. We should get information about the leadership styles and use the suitable one according to the current situation

Remember those people you felt were annoying, asking for updates and for t-shirt sizes for engineering effort? Well, you're those people now. Engineering managers are responsible for many project management tasks, more than you'd expect until you're in the role. Going in with eyes wide open will help you avoid frustration at the proportion of your time you will now spend on reporting and stakeholder management.

Operational Excellence plays an important in achieving the personal goals as well as Organizational goals- ? Support Excellence: Do we have a line of sight of software Illites for eg. how many bugs did we cause, how fast did we fix them, did performance degraded after the last release? How many production incidences we had, what was the downtime? ? Release management: How do we release? How often do we release? Can we automate everything? Do we want to automate everything? Should we automate everything? Do we do load tests first? Do we run load tests in production vs performance env? Do we roll out gradually? how do we rollback? ? Technical debt: How do we make sure our development pace doesn’t come to a halt due to all our quick shortcuts?

Understanding market dynamics, customer needs, competition, and organizational business models is crucial. Aligning team efforts with business goals, measuring impact, and communicating value to stakeholders are essential aspects. Acquiring business skills involves learning fundamental concepts like finance, marketing, sales, and strategy. This can be achieved through studying business literature, podcasts, and engaging with industry experts. During your career you'll often find the opportunity to apply skills that you aquired but don't seem like an immediate fit to your new role. I found, concepts and patterns repeat, industry and job agnostic.

As an engineering manager, now you must develop and include business skills to your ever growing list of skills and concerns. This includes making sure the project output and results meets or exceeds the business requirements, maintain good relationships with clients and shareholders, and if in your scope, obtain new clients. In addition, keep tabs on the latest trends on the market, and update stakeholders on them.

I have found, both from my own journey and others, that developing people skills is an area where new engineering managers have to work at the hardest. Speed up your learning by emulating a role model, and asking yourself the question "What would they do?" whenever you feel stuck addressing the concerns of your people. Additionally, seek out a mentor who can give you non-judgemental and contextual advice on people conversations you feel unsure about. An edge that you have coming fresh from being an individual contributor is that your level of empathy could surpass that of a seasoned manager. This unique perspective is powerful — leverage it to build stronger connections and to cultivate a more content and cohesive team environment.

Empathy is a very strong word in the world of people management. In my experience trust takes time specially for new team/manager combination during the process when conflict arises it is important to maintain empathic relation.

The best advice I ever got when I was promoted from an IC engineering role to eng management: "The skills that got you here aren't the ones that will carry you in this role. It's a different game." Engineering management is a fine balance of people management, influence, communication, leadership, and technical skills. Most of us got promoted at ICs because of our technical prowess (and yes, maybe a bit of persuasion and communication skills). But being an excellent manager is a brave new world. If you tell yourself that you have a lot to learn, you can open your mind to the challenges and learning opportunities ahead. Good luck!

The transition from an individual contributor to a manager always means you need to learn how to delegate the work. Now, you are not simply a senior developer to whom more junior developers come for advice. You are the nexus of all incoming work. While you are effectively responsible for getting this work done, you must distribute it to the individuals on your team while establishing trust and necessary control and avoiding micromanagement. It is paramount to accept that there may be many solutions to a problem. Finally, while you as a manager may get all the blame, you must step back and give public recognition to individuals successfully delivering their part. If there is a room for improvement, you discuss it in private.