The Complete Engineering Manager
Ideal split up of Engineering Manager’s responsibilities and what it takes to be a complete engineering manager 💯
Merry Christmas 🎅 🎄 to everyone!
This is the final part of Engineering Manager’s Starter Kit. To read from the first part, check it out here:
Engineering Manager’s responsibilities vary from organization to organization. I was doing engineering management even before assuming a title. Yes, there are engineers who are doing the job of an engineering manager without a title based on the size and need of an organization.
Once I formally started EMing teams, I experienced different needs and responsibilities in different organizations. In my first engineering management job, it was more tech oriented and less responsibility on the people's side - I was mainly looking into project delivery, prioritization between product / tech initiatives and responsible for making technical decisions. With later experiences, focus shifted towards people management, bringing up performance of the team as a whole and contributing more towards creating impact at the organization level by working closely with cross-functional stakeholders as one team.
In an ideal world, what does the engineering manager title entails? How does the responsibility get split between different areas? - In other words, what does it take to be a complete engineering manager? - without further ado, let’s deep dive:
People Management: Manage yourself and people around you better.
Project & Delivery: Deliver impactful projects with good quality and in a timely manner by fine tuning delivery practices and metrics of your engineering team.
Your Team and wider Organization: Your team dynamics, performance and evolution, working with the wider organization and aligning your team’s priorities to deliver business impact.
Processes: Identify processes that’s working and not for your engineering team and to evolve development, delivery and technical processes to improve their efficiency and throughput.
Technical: Technical enough to take part in tech discussions, decisions, code reviews and sometimes hands-on coding.
If you take 100% as your full contribution, you have to split between your area of responsibilities. Out of all responsibilities, people management (30%) will be your primary contribution and responsibility as an engineering manager. Following that, would be: project delivery (25%) and wider organization (25%), whereas Processes (10%) and Technical (10%) skill takes the minimum share of all.
Percentage here is a roundabout and varies from organization to organization and from team to team by +-10, but this should give you a rough picture on what to expect.
If your team expects you to do hands-on coding or you’re building a technical product, technical contribution will increase from 10%, but to be compromised from other responsibilities - after all, it's math.
If your engineering team is quite new and currently being formed, you need to establish new processes and team practices, hence its share will increase. If your organization is a small startup and less people to manage, contribution to people management and wider organization will decrease letting you to contribute to other areas, especially being more technical.
Are you managing people in double digits? - In this case, the share of people management will increase linearly.
In the current changing landscape and priorities, being more agile is quite important and having skills across the whole array of responsibilities will make you a Complete Engineering Manager that every team needs.
That’s the wrap of Engineering Manager’s Starter Kit 🎁 series. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading so far and I’ll wind up until end of this year reflecting on my own journey so far in my personal and professional life.
See you everyone soon in 2024 with a fresh start! Wish everyone amazing new year ahead!
I would love to hear your feedback or thoughts - Let me know in comments.