Your first 6 months as an Engineering Manager
A pragmatic checklist of first 6 months of an engineering manager
You’re getting onboarded on your first day as an EM, got to say hi to your direct reports, your manager greets you and over the days and weeks, you gradually start to have a feeling of what this role is for you. On the other hand, you start to attend onboarding sessions on how the company came into existence, about the presence of your domain and team, and start to complete mandatory training one after the other.
Pretty relaxed, huh?
When you feel like you have all the time in the world, there’s a slack message coming in rushing, “Hey, Can your team look at this issue which leads to failure of 10,000+ bookings as it’s causing a massive impact to the business and a bad reputation with our customers?”. You might be thinking “Where have all those meet-and-greet words gone and there’s a person here who got straight to the point?” - Welcome aboard. Now, now, you’ve officially started your first day as an Engineering Manager!
As a new EM, people will be keen to know about you and how you will be leading the team. It’s a defining moment for your direct reports as you’ll have a major role to play in their career and help them to do their best job. Your manager will be hoping that you can build a champion team. Your stakeholders will be expecting you to prioritize delivery by cutting corners even though it means compromising on the technical front. You should look to get off to a good start in the first 6 months. In fact, a flying start.
You either get promoted in the same organization to an EM or join a new organization, irrespective of it, your first 6 months are crucial on how you perform as you seek a good start in your new role. What will be going through your mind? Excited? Anxious? Curious? - I would assume butterflies will be fluttering through your stomach.
Month 1: The Larger Context and the People
First month is all about getting yourself oriented. Get to know a bit of everything about people, organization, product, processes, your domain and the business, ultimately understanding what role you play in the mix.
Checklist for your first month:
Intro 1-1: Book your first 1-1 with your manager, direct reports and cross-functional stakeholders as you’ll work closely with them and with your peer EMs, your manager's boss and peers of your manager - even though you may not work closely with them everyday, it’s good to build that rapport from the beginning. Explore each other’s strengths, weaknesses and aspirations, core values that you believe in and wrap up with understanding ways of working together.
Woah, that's a lot of people to meet. Overwhelming but rewarding at the end. Schedule weekly 1-1s with people that you will work closely with: your manager, your direct reports and your product counterpart in your team.
Write your MoM (Manual of Me) and share with all the people that you will work closely with. Do a deep dive 1-1 with your direct reports to discuss commonalities and differences, expectations and decide how you can work together better.
Complete onboarding sessions about your organization, business and how everything works together. It’s a good chance to connect with executives and senior leaders in your organization and interact with them about the journey so far and the general direction of the organization.
Define your 3-month and 6-month goals with your manager and create regular check-ins to reflect on how you’re progressing towards your goals. It’s quite important to align on expectations at the earliest to avoid any differences in opinions that may arise later.
Understand your team’s scope, current goals and roadmap and how that connects to the organization's strategy, vision and mission. Clarify how your team does the prioritization and makes decisions. It will greatly help you in aligning your thoughts.
Take part in processes on how your team collaborates, builds and delivers software to get a feeling for yourself. In addition to making notes of your impression on the team's processes, ask explicitly what’s working well and not, their pain points and gather ideas for improvements. Probably you need to revisit in subsequent months to assist the team by reviewing and refining processes.
Understand the top 3 immediate priorities where your team needs you the most as an Engineering Manager. Are they struggling with prioritization? Do they need someone to push back on product decisions? Do they need someone to guide in their career and fast track achieving their goals? - Find it out.
You’ll end your first month with a better understanding of what this role means to you, who are the people you’ll be working with and significance to larger context. It’s fair to say that the first month will be full of first impressions on everything that you will come across and leave you wanting to know more and eager to contribute back.
On the other end of the spectrum, people would have known about you, start to get the feeling of who you are as a person, but not yet on the hard skills as an engineering manager and eager to witness how you perform this role on a day-to-day basis and handle challenging situations.
Month 2: A level deeper
With a head start that you gained in the first month, you should look to strengthen relationships with people around you and deep dive into your team’s product and technical scope, ongoing projects, pressing problems and priorities. Don’t leave out observing your team’s performance too late. This is the month to understand where they stand in terms of deliverables, challenges they face and where they need to improve.
Observe your team’s communication pattern and style within and outside your team, jargon used and identify gaps. Suggest training and development programs who could improve their communication once you build rapport with your direct reports.
Review each of your reports’ goals, progress and challenges in the past months and understand areas where they need managerial support.
Pair with an engineer and get an onboarding on internal tools, technologies and technical integration. Fancy setting up technical projects locally? - go for it.
Look into your team's performance metrics to understand how your team has been performing, challenges and areas to improve. Take a specific project case or situation when team performance suffered and what followed after.
Understand expectations of each career level and how the performance review and evaluation process is carried out in your organization. Read previous performance reviews of your reports to get an understanding of the conversation that happened, promises and misses.
Deep dive into ongoing projects, milestones and its status. Understand how project updates are reported to management and the role you play.
Listen to your stakeholders to understand their pain points, expectations from your team and make a note of their impressions about your team working in a project or deliverable.
Book a bi-weekly 1-1 with your peer engineering manager to build connections and discuss how your teams can work together. None can explain better than them on how the engineering management function works in your organization.
Month 3: Taking Ownership
By now, you’ve spent a good amount of time understanding people, processes, problems and the technical side of things and were able to summarize your team’s performance. Your team can see your active participation in the second month and can see you gradually getting into the groove. Only thing that you haven’t done yet is taking ownership.
You might still have questions and doubts on the scope that your team owns but that shouldn’t stop you from taking ownership so that you can exhibit your managerial abilities sooner than later. This is the month where you will start to collaborate closely with your team in day-to-day work and understand their challenges and concerns.
Own your team’s roadmap and delivery, communicate progress and potential delays in key projects to stakeholders and to the leadership team.
Involve in prioritization and planning of short term goals (sprints), negotiate and set realistic expectations.
Take a project from start to finish and work closely with your teammates to resolve a blocker and help them move forward as that will give you tons of confidence.
Lead team ceremonies and observe team’s interaction and engagement from the moderator's point of view. Share your feedback in 1-1s on how you see an individual's interaction, understand their perspective and suggest improvements.
Take ownership of the stability of your technical systems and define an incident prioritization and management process. Interface your stakeholders and other business teams on the resolution as your team will be busy fixing it.
Consider adopting DoR (Definition of Ready) and DoD (Definition of Done) to ensure completeness and quality of your team’s delivery.
On nearing the end of your third month, Ask for feedback from your teammates on how you handle situations from the time you took ownership and what could have been better.
Do a quarterly review with your manager on how you are progressing towards your goals and general feedback on: What are you doing well and should continue? What could you have done better? What you haven’t done yet that you should have done or something that you need to look into sooner?
Month 4: Drive Change and Foster Collaboration
By this month, you start to feel at home. With earned trust and rapport, you can look to drive change that your team dearly needs. A change that takes your team forward. A change that they were thinking about for quite some time but couldn’t pull it off by themselves. You’re a change agent in a way, isn’t it?
Assess and evolve your team’s current processes to improve efficiency and effectiveness in how they collaborate, build and deliver software.
Encourage knowledge sharing and nurture a collaborative learning environment among team members to foster continuous learning and personal growth.
Lead a workshop in defining the team's current performance level, where you want to be in a few months’ time and how will you reach there?
Openly discuss failures and perform post mortems that ensure a fail safe environment in your team and be pragmatic about it.
Encourage your direct reports to do a skip level 1-1s to share feedback and exchange perspectives with your manager on a regular basis. Facilitating regular connection between your direct reports and your manager is a healthy way of collaboration that sets up 360° feedback.
Leverage team retrospective and bring action items to life by taking lead and driving them. Give kudos to deserving people by recognizing wins and learnings.
Review and refine your team meetings that have a purpose and produce tangible outcomes.
Month 5: Strategic Planning
Taking ownership and driving change should have given you enough confidence to start strategic planning around people, roadmap and long term goals of your team. From this month, you’ll start to spend time on long term goals as the vision has become less blurry than the previous months. As you start to take more ownership, your manager will start to lean on your expertise and seek your plans, your needs and your team’s priorities and be less concerned about it themselves - A moment where you feel autonomy is given to you without being asked. That’s all the earned trust can do for someone.
Plan your team’s mid-to-long term goals and roadmap with your product manager and discuss with your team based on the direction and vision that the leadership team set.
Prioritize initiatives taking reach, impact, confidence and effort into account. Through the process, you’ve said “no” to non-priority requests and communicated to stakeholders accordingly.
Advocate investing in tech initiatives that contribute to technology strategy which will bring long term benefits alongside product initiatives.
Build a tech radar for technologies that your team will adopt, trial, assess and stop to adopt an experimentation mindset and let your team make decisions autonomously.
Regulate hiring needs for your team at least for the next one year based on the growth opportunity.
Drafting growth plans for a high performing engineer, performance improvement plan for a low performing engineer and decisive future plans for each engineer in your team.
Delegate to leverage individual team members’ strength and areas that they would like to learn and grow.
Month 6: Reflection and Looking ahead
By this month, everyone around you should have already witnessed the impact that you bring to your people, team, business and environment in general. Reflect on your journey so far and your plans ahead. You’re no longer a new manager after having nearly 6 months under your belt and becoming a familiar face in the organization.
Plans for the next big thing for you and your team. Tailor the learning and training needs for you and your team to be prepared.
Your reputation and credibility is established beyond your manager and higher management were able to recognize your performance as an engineering manager.
Challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone and do what you haven’t done yet. It could be involved in product discovery for a week, attending customer calls, shadowing your stakeholders, debugging a production incident with your engineer - I assure you it will be a lot of fun and totally worth it.
Start to challenge and push back on decisions from other teams and were able to negotiate scope and priorities.
Your team slowly starts to become autonomous and you can see them taking more ownership on deliverables and driving continuous improvements.
Share your first 6-months experience as an engineering manager through writing on a platform internal to your organization or a blog.
Do a 6-month review with your manager on how you have progressed towards your goals and general feedback on: What have you done well and should continue? What could you have done better? What you haven’t done yet that you should have done or something that you need to look into sooner?
At the end of 6 months, your goal should be to establish yourself as a competent engineering manager that everyone around you trusts.
Few aspects that will be common in all the months are: continuous learning, regular check-in on progress towards your goals, exchanging and incorporating feedback, course correction and working closely with people.
Based on your team’s situation and circumstances, you need to focus on one aspect before the other and may need to fit into a 3 month plan instead of 6 months. For instance, becoming an engineering manager of a team that’s suffering from performance, your main focus would be to improve delivery right from the beginning by driving change and fostering collaboration. For a team that historically has a high attrition rate and lack motivation, your main priority would be to motivate, build the team from the ground up and instill a sense of purpose. For a team that’s performing well but overworked over years and burned out needs an engineering manager who can push back and act as a gatekeeper.
Adaptability is the key here. Adapt above 6 months plan to suit your needs.
What’s your experience in setting up your first 30-60-90 days, up to 6 months plan? - Would love to hear your thoughts.