What should we expect a great Engineering Manager to do?

What does an Engineering Manager (EM) do? What should we expect out of them? How do I know if my engineering manager is great?

I got these questions a lot from engineers, candidates or even engineering managers themselves. The answer is … it depends on the company! Different companies have different needs and put different responsibilities with the same title.

I always see an EM functioning in the following five areas:

?? Staffing

?? Career Development

?? Delivery/Execution

? Team Efficiency

?? Engineering Culture

Let’s dive deep into each area and talk about what a great EM would do in each area.

??Staffing

Companies grow and shrink and people come and go. One of the main responsibilities of an EM is to identify the company's needs and allow the teams to grow organically. There are many things involved in the process. First of all, an EM needs to know the team’s needs well enough to find the right person to hire. The opposite goes true. If needed, they need to manage people out of the team.

A great EM would have the following attributes:

• Able to forecast the needs of the team in the next 6-12 months and identify (and escalate) the hiring needs accordingly
• Able to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing teammates and identify who could be a great complement to the team
• Able to create/update the hiring and interview process to ensure that it is fair, diverse and inclusive
• Be a great collaborator with the Talent team to recruit the right people; ideally, able to attract great talents through their network
• Able to simplify the interview process to provide a great experience for the candidates
• Able to retain the high performing teammates, especially the ones with the most potential
• Able to create an awesome onboarding experience and support for the new hires
• Able to handle difficult conversations
• Able to manage the team’s morale and efficiency if someone, unfortunately, needs to be managed out of the team

Some effects to observe as a result of a great EM:

• The success rate of hiring the offered candidates is high
• The team goes through the forming, storming, and norming stage very quickly with the new hires
• The team is happy working with one another and no one feels like they are burning out because the team is well-staffed and supported
• The talent team loves working with this EM
• There is a high retention rate on the team
• Candidates have great experience and they are advocates for the company even if they do not get hired
• The people hired by the EM stay at the company for a long period
• If teammates leave the company, they still say good things about the company and they would recommend others to join the company or work with this EM

?? Career Development

One of the main and biggest responsibilities of an EM is to focus on people and help them to grow. Whether the team consists of junior people or seasoned engineering leaders, the EM needs to apply different skill sets to coach their team to grow professionally and ideally align them to the company's goals. An amazing EM should be a great advocate and champion of the engineer’s career growth.

A great EM would have the following attributes:

• Able to provide (and receive) feedback frequently and candidly
• Able to provide recognition and public praise for the work the teammates have done
• (Proactively) Spend time with the teammate at 1:1 to discuss their career growth path and align with them on their current position on their career path (ideally through the Career Ladder/Matrix)
• Work on goal setting with the teammate and follow up with them closely on their progress
• Understand the business goals very well and sees how the teammate can help to contribute to the success of the business goals
• Proactively search for opportunities for them to take on to help with their career growth
• Challenge the teammate to be out of their comfort zone
• Understand what the teammate is passionate about and search for a place for them to shine in the company
• Find out if the teammate is happy and what contributes to their motivation
• Find out whether the teammate is being paid fairly within the company and act accordingly
• Pair the teammate up with a mentor to accelerate their growth
• Provide resources to help them with their growth
• Clearly understand the promotion/comp adjustment cycle of the company and work with the teammate together on the promotion or comp adjustment path
• Be the advocate for the teammate and journey with them on their career growth

Some effects to observe as a result of a great EM:

• A strong trust is built between the EM and the teammate
• The teammate’s contributions constantly get recognized by other people in the company. Other stakeholders love working with their teammates.
• When it comes to promotion support, people in the company would be well aligned and very happy to support the teammate in promotion
• The teammate is happy and sees a positive difference in their growth over the past 6-12 months
• The teammate is motivated to do more and learn more and they understand the path in front of them to grow
• A lot of people get promoted or merit increases under the leadership of this EM
• Low-performing teammates got turned around (or have a great self-awareness that they might not be the right fit for the company)
• The team is more willing to help one another grow
• The quality and velocity of the work of the team get better and the team can handle a more challenging or bigger scope of work
• Various initiatives start happening as a result of the teammates working together better and the morale of the team goes up
• Teammate is not afraid of discussing their passion with this EM or asking for feedback or potential for raises/promotion in the company
• Teammate might want to stay with this EM even though they have an opportunity to switch team

?? Delivery/Execution

In Andy Grove’s High Output Management, Andy introduces management with this classic equation: A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighbouring organizations under his influence. No matter whether the EM works in a product features or platform team, the EM is responsible for the delivery and execution of the team. A great EM works closely with their product partners and engineers to consistently deliver high-quality work. They know how to prioritize and drive value to the customers fast and incrementally enhance the product.

A great EM would have the following attributes:

• Is technical enough (or a quick learner) to understand the mission, the vision and the work of their team well
• Is a great project manager - knows how to prioritize tasks and plan ahead
• Is a great communicator to all the stakeholders
• Is a great roadblock and distraction remover to allow the team to focus on their work to get things done
• Is a curious leader who can identify risks early in the feature/project
• Can break down the tasks/problems into smaller pieces to allow consistent values to be delivered to the customers
• Is an amazing collaborator with their Product counterparts and they can cover one another as they are always very synced up
• Is a data-driven decision maker
• Holds a high standard of the quality
• Cares about solving customer’s problems
• Is highly adaptive and can quickly rearrange things when unexpected things come the way
• Is great at risk management and able to prevent chaos from happening
• Collaborates well with other teams on getting things done (if work is required from other teams)
• Can juggle well between different features/projects with different context
• Can reflect and learn from mistakes and failures and iterate on the process to make things better
• Is a great coach to enable the team members to think critically and make the right decisions
• Keeps the team accountable and ensures the team delivers!

Some effects to observe as a result of a great EM:

• The team consistently delivers great value to the customers
• Stakeholders are always kept in the loop on progress and they can rely on the team on handling risks and communicate early with them
• Cross-functional team members love working with this team
• Dashboards are set up to monitor the engineering and product metrics and engineers care about the metrics
• Engineers are close to the customers and have a great desire to solve customers’ problems
• Engineers have a solid idea about the work ahead
• Engineers got time to focus on their work and they have minimal distractions
• The amount of bugs or incidents on the team is low due to the high quality of the product
• The team learns from reflections and mistakes and they become stronger and more resilient
• It’s easy to talk about tech debt or any other technical initiatives and add them to the roadmap of the team
• EM or PM can go on vacations without worrying about the team not being able to deliver certain features
• Other teams involved in executing a feature together love working with this team

? Team Efficiency

Growing individuals on the team is important, but enabling the team to work as a team instead of a group of individuals is a very important yet challenging task for an EM. Philosopher Aristotle said that “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. It is an important area of responsibility and expectation of an EM - to create synergy within the team. A team can still deliver without synergy, but they can deliver much more and are less prone to failure if the team works together. A great EM can build their team up with good habits and processes so that they can be an efficient, autonomous, self-resilient team.

A great EM would have the following attributes:

• Builds up the team through the forming, storming, norming and performing stage
• Builds trust within the team
• Identifies the dysfunctions of their team and puts in the effort to resolve them
• Ensures that the team produces more than the sum of individuals
• Builds up processes and habits to ensure that the team works like a team
• Coaches the team to work more agile and deliver the values to the customers frequently
• Understands the team’s strengths and weaknesses well and knows how to fill the gap
• Empowers the team to do more and to understand the deeper why behind
• Coaches the team to learn from failures and build up resiliency
• Experiments with new ideas and learns from failures
• Always improves and has a growth mindset

Some effects to observe as a result of a great EM:

• The team becomes more autonomous in running the day-to-day operations and they learn how to make better decisions themselves
• Any teammate or EM can take a vacation or sick days without worrying about unresolved or undecided things. The team would proactively step up to cover for one another
• A lot of healthy conflicts and discussions within the team to do things better and more effective and innovative solutions would come out from the team
• The team feels comfortable sharing their feedback with one another
• The team would learn from their failure and build up resiliency
• Morale is high within the team and team members are happy to stay on this team
• The team can likely get things done with less time
• Tech debt and bugs would be kept under control
• Great items come from retros and the team would follow up on those items
• Team members are not afraid of mentioning ideas or collaborate with the Product leaders and they would proactively take on high-value initiatives
• Both the EM and their Product counterparts have time to focus on the vision and strategy instead of the day-to-day details of how the team should run
• The teammate is a great advocate for one another’s growth
• Team members would proactively help one another and knowledge within the team is well shared and documented. No one is siloed in their knowledge

?? Engineering Culture / Initiatives

In Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage, Patrick articulated a “First Team” mindset. It is the idea that true leaders prioritize supporting their fellow leaders over their direct reports. I often ask EMs to think about who is their first team. A lot of the EMs think that their first team is the team they manage. For an organization to grow and move forward, it is super important for the EMs to work as one team to collaborate with their peers. The Engineering organization would not become more mature without putting some work into it. Some examples of the engineering culture or initiatives include: career ladder development, onboarding process, co-op program, book clubs, hackathons, mentorship programs, open-source project contributions, thought leadership, engineering conferences, cross-team project planning, promotion alignment, engineering culture project, incident management program, engineering blog and Engineering offsite etc. The EMs are responsible for driving the Engineering culture and other initiatives to allow the whole Engineering organization to grow stronger and better.

A great EM would have the following attributes:

• Understands the vision, strategy, OKR, metrics etc very well in the organization and involves in defining them and contributing to their progress
• Sees opportunities to improve at a larger scale and proactively leads those initiatives
• Has 1:1 with their fellow EMs
• Aligns with other EMs on plans
• Is a great communicator and can identify the stakeholders involved in an initiative easily
• Collaborate with others to get buy-in and executes the initiatives
• Involves the engineers and other EMs in the initiatives
• Leads by example to live out the company values
• Learn from their peers and helps peers to grow
• Takes feedback and advice from peers
• Multiplies leaders in owning initiatives and identifying opportunities to make the engineering org better

Some effects to observe as a result of a great EM:

• The whole Engineering org is clear about the vision and is excited about moving toward the vision as a group
• Engineers are proud of being an engineer in the company
• EMs are supportive of one another and they are not afraid to share different ideas
• EMs are well aware of the changes one another is going to make so less cross-team chaos is going to happen
• There is more consistency in promotion, merit increases and performance reviews across all teams
• Engineers can move between teams and they would still feel supported in their career growth
• EMs see their growth path and how they can make more impact within the company; EMs might be able to find mentors within the company
• Engineers see the EM as a thought leader and someone they can learn from
• The company sees a difference in the work being done on the Engineering org and other departments start to follow the lead to try out some initiatives
• Engineers or EMs are empowered to experiment with initiatives
• The moral of the engineering team goes up and Engineering org has a better ENPS score
• The engineering org is recognized in the industry for its practices and quality of work

Those are the five areas of responsibility I would expect an EM to do. Some of those areas do influence one another. For example, if the Engineering culture is great and people are happy, it’s easier to attract great talents and people can deliver more effectively. If an EM could do extremely well in one area, they are likely going to do somewhat well in another area. If they fail in one area, there will likely be signs of failure in another area. Different companies have different expectations of their EMs. Managers of EMs, please make your expectations clear to your EMs. Engineers, please try to understand what you should expect from your EM and keep your EMs accountable. A great EM does make a big difference in an engineer’s life. In this article, we talk about the expectations and outcomes of an engineering manager. In the future, we’ll discuss the strategies to get to the outcomes.

What about you? What are you looking for in an EM?