An engineering manager’s position exists to provide engineering teams with day-to-day leadership and representation. They keep alignment within the team and serve as the team’s representative in cross-functional and leadership settings. In other words, engineering managers exist to produce long-term successful outcomes for engineers and companies.

When considering engineering manager responsibilities, you might think of a litany of tasks. Timely project delivery! Robust systems design! Mentoring! Hiring! The list goes on endlessly. The day-to-day tasks of an engineering manager are variable, but the broad responsibilities are the same: maintaining a team capable of serving the needs of the business, producing mechanisms to make the team self-sustaining and scalable, and owning the reputation and impact of the team.

This definition may leave you wondering: where are the fun parts? What about growing and teaching and building a strong engineering culture? While each of these things is important in its own right, an engineering manager should understand the order of operations: that these practices result from the necessity of producing good work, not the other way around. Your responsibility is not to produce good engineering culture; it is to produce good work that serves the needs of the business. Great engineering practices must result from the intention to produce great engineering work.

Let’s go through each of these responsibilities in turn.

Maintaining a team capable of serving business needs

Engineering managers set their teams up for success by understanding the business and organizational settings they are in and preparing their engineers to thrive in those settings. As illustrated in Figure 1.1, engineering managers interpret a variety of inputs to determine how best to direct their team. This responsibility may require attention to many areas, such as ways of working, technology choices, staffing, team culture, and cross-functional interactions. While we may only know so much at a given time, it’s helpful to consider anticipated future changes in needs as well as emerging technology trends:

Figure 1.1 – Engineering manager inputs and outputs

Here are some questions you can use to consider this:

• Is my team working closely enough with business leaders to understand their domain and needs?
• Is my team capable of serving those business needs today or is it a stretch?
• Do we have the tools and processes we need to deliver?
• Do we have the talent we need on the team?
• Do we have the supporting cross-functional roles we need to do great engineering work?
• Do we have a shared vision to be inspired and make consistent choices?
• Do we have the support and guidance to grow and improve as engineers?

Not all of these considerations may be under your direct control to change, but they are still helpful to identify. It may be that you will need to spend more of your time influencing factors outside of the engineering team to help your team and company be successful.

Producing mechanisms to be self-sustaining and scalable

Engineering managers have a responsibility to optimize their teams. They improve engineering workflows and reduce dependencies and repetitive tasks. Self-sustaining teams minimize dependencies that hinder them in their efforts to achieve their objectives. Scalable teams minimize software delivery steps and eliminate bottlenecks. The mechanisms to achieve this may include the use of tools, conventions, documentation, processes, or abstract things such as values and principles. Any action that produces a tangible improvement in the speed, reliability, or robustness of your team’s work is worth your consideration.

Theme – continuous improvement

In this chapter, we will introduce traits shared by experienced engineering managers that serve as recurring themes in this book. Great engineering managers are obsessed with continuous improvement for themselves and their engineering teams. They believe that there is always room for improvement and are open to new perspectives to that end.

Here are some questions you can use to consider how self-sustaining and scalable your team is today:

• What dependencies do we have on other teams?
• What dependencies do other teams have on us? Do we have clear contracts and interfaces that other teams can rely on?
• When we onboard a new engineer, how much time does that take from the existing engineering team?
• How much of our time is spent on manual interventions (such as responding to and resolving incidents)?
• Do we have the culture and values to be harmonious and productive?
• How do we respond to unexpected events? Are we resilient as an engineering team or are we brittle?
• Are roles and responsibilities clear for us and our cross-functional partners?
• Are we able to measure our work output and performance as a team?
• How many of our core processes rely on meetings?
• How many of our core processes have a single point of failure (SPOF)?

Answer these questions for yourself, honestly and without judgment. You will have plenty of time to formulate a plan to address areas for improvement as you settle into the role of engineering manager.

Owning the reputation and impact of the team

Engineering managers have a responsibility for their team’s performance and output. They maintain awareness of the engineering team’s commitments and progress. They act as a resource to help engineers do their best work. They cultivate sources of information outside of the team to have a balanced view of how their team is doing.

Here are some questions you can use to consider this:

• Am I currently aware of my team’s reputation? Is it a strong reputation?
• Do engineers on other teams know what my team does?
• Do engineers on other teams like working with my team? Why or why not?
• Do people outside of engineering know what my team does?
• Do non-engineers like working with my team? Why or why not?
• Is my team impactful? Does it find ways to innovate and deliver creative solutions that produce a competitive advantage?
• Does company leadership understand the capabilities and value of my team?
• Is my team celebrated?

If you find that you don’t know the answers to most of these questions, that is okay! You now have some talking points and information to gather for later.

So, now that we understand the general responsibilities of engineering managers, let’s go through the activities and tasks that managers perform in service to these responsibilities.

An engineering manager’s work is made up of only four basic activities. Sounds easy, right? This is what they do:

• Engineering
• Managing
• Transitioning
• Big-picture thinking

How much of your time is spent on these activities will be determined by contextual and personal factors we will learn about later in this chapter. So, let’s examine these.

Engineering—the planning and delivery of software for business needs—may be the bulk of your work as an engineering manager. You may contribute directly to these activities, coding alongside your individual contributors, but the primary role of an engineering manager in engineering activities is one of leadership, to guide and facilitate the best possible outcome and take accountability for decisions made. Let’s break down the elements of engineering leadership activities:

• Leading architecture
• Project planning and delivery
• Supporting production systems

Managing—providing for the needs, well-being, and professional growth of your team—may be the bulk of your work as an engineering manager. This aspect of an engineering manager’s role is incredibly impactful and can’t be overemphasized in its ability to lead to great success or crushing failure from seemingly small changes. Let’s go through the elements of management activities:

• Working cross-functionally
• Communicating with authority
• Assessing and improving team performance
• Fostering accountability
• Managing risk

Transitioning—guiding your team from one state of being to the next—is an inevitable eventuality for all engineering managers. Managers have a crucial role in preparing teams for change, contextualizing changes as they come, and providing teams with a sense of stability in an ever-changing world. Let’s break down the key areas of transitioning:

• Resilient leadership
• Scaling your team
• Handling changing priorities, company pivots, and re-orgs

Big-picture thinking—is the time you devote to broader and more abstract questions of how to grow the utility and value of your engineering organization while retaining the progress and talent you have, touching on elements of all of the previous activities while thinking creatively to maximize impact and leverage. Key areas include:

• Retaining talent
• Team design

I have organized this book around these four activities as parts and chapters. If you are particularly interested in one topic, you can jump ahead, but it is recommended to read the topics in order for the best understanding.

Now that you understand what engineering managers are responsible for and the activities they perform in service to those responsibilities, let’s go over how we might spend our day as engineering managers.