What is the responsibility of an engineering manager
When I first became an engineering manager, I could not clearly articulate what is my responsibility. As an individual contributor, I knew I had to code, test, design, and deliver on various projects but as an engineering manager, I was not able to come up with a set of things that I could objectively state as my responsibilities and deliverables.
At that time, I was still actively coding, managing people, sending status reports, sitting in interviews, and doing performance reviews among million other things.
My time was spread across so many activities. I was not sure which one to do and which one to leave. I felt overwhelmed and at the same time felt underachieved.
After struggling for a couple of years, I set aside my ego and acknowledged that I don’t know the actual role and responsibility of an engineering manager and I started from a place where most of us would start from — GOOG.
I came across a lot of very generic things. Sample this
I was doing most of it, but still, I felt I could not objectively measure most of these.
I started to reach out to other engineering managers and some of them gave me great pointers and shared their day-to-day routines. I am super grateful to them but it wasn’t until I met some awesome product managers that I started to understand my role, as an EM, better and better. I noticed that great product managers used input and output metrics to track most of their impact.
Input and Output Metrics
Most of the companies have a set of business metrics they track. These metrics often have a tree-like structure. For example, for Spotify, creating playlists and discovering new songs increases time spent per session in turn it increases time spent listening to music. First level input metrics are discovering new songs and creating playlists which contribute to the next level output metric of increasing time spent per session and the final output metric of time spent listening to music. If you are a product manager in the team that is responsible for these input metrics, you need to create a framework for tracking these input metrics and create attribution to your immediate output metrics and final output metric.
This was very clear and more importantly measurable. I copied this and started to define my objectives, roles, and responsibilities based on nodes in a tree and how it connects to the business.
An Example
At that time, I was a director, managing 2 engineering managers and an implementation manager in my team. My team roughly was about 30 people.
Here is a sample of color-coded tree structure based on input and output metrics that I came up with (The numbers and text here are just a sample to illustrate the model)
I color-coded tree nodes that I am responsible for, managers in my team are responsible for and other teams are responsible for. Doing so helped me understand what I am accountable for and to share and hold other team members accountable for their outcomes.
Note that each box has a measurable way to know whether it was accomplished or not. At the end of a month or quarter, I was able to tell whether the outcomes that I/my team was responsible for were met or not. If not met, how far off we were.
Unexpected Benefits
After coming up with this framework the biggest benefit for me is that I was able to articulate what I am responsible for to anyone who asked. I was so happy. There were other unexpected benefits too.
Upper management communication
Given this framework, I noticed my communication with my manager and skip-level manager became very clear. They were able to understand what my teams were working on and how they contributed to the overall company strategy. Sending periodic status reports, which I hate, became a breeze since I just had to list down the latest numbers from various tree nodes.
Negative Nancy says — “Every team and every manager is different. Having just numbers and alignment is not enough”
Me — Agreed. But adding these details to the template you already have will add value to the reader.
To address tech debt or not
As an engineering manager, tech debt is something I had a hard time pushing for prioritization. It is always a hot topic debated during the prioritization period.
With this framework in place, I was forced to come up with numbers to track and measure tech debt improvements. I used the following metrics to quantify the need for tech debt
- Number of incidents in production
- Number of deployment failures due to regression bugs
- Average time taken to resolve incidents
Negative Nancy says — “Tech debt is not easy to quantify or attribute to real value. Tracking these metrics may not accurately measure the impact of addressing tech debt.”
Me — Yes, sometimes it can help improve the morale of the team, which is hard to measure accurately. Still, if you put down some real metrics and measure them it will guide you in terms of the overall trend.
1x1
I felt that I had more structure to my 1x1 with my reports. There was very little miscommunication in terms of what is expected and what is delivered. We reviewed the numbers twice a month and if things were not going according to plan we were able to make necessary adjustments.
One of the positive feedbacks that I received was how my reports saw their work was aligned with some company objectives.
Performance Reviews
One of the biggest challenges I had, when I took over engineering management, was writing my performance reviews. Since I was overwhelmed with “activities”, I was not able to write a good performance review for myself or my team.
Having this framework helped create the building blocks needed to write the performance review. I could clearly say whether I achieved the objectives I/my team were responsible for or not.
If you are in the same boat as me then give this approach a try and let me know how it went for you.
I am sure there are many other ways to address the roles and responsibilities of an engineering manager. What are some of the ways you address them? You can respond to this email and share your thoughts.
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