What Should I Be Doing Right Now? The Director’s Edition
In 2016, I gave a talk at the Calibrate conference titled “What Should I be Doing Right Now?”. Shortly afterwards, I published a blog post titled “The missing piece of a manager’s responsibilities” with an important addendum to the model, reflecting on how an engineering manager spends their days and how priorities shift over time. I received an overwhelmingly positive response and I am often pleasantly surprised when coworkers stumble across them and send me a DM thanking me for giving the talk or writing the article.
Now that I have held Director roles at medium and large companies, I want to share more reflections on the responsibilities I have identified as representing what it means to be operating specifically at the Director level.
The expectations of Directors seem to be the fuzziest in the corporate ladder. That is because Directors are, as Matt Trunnell (ex-Netflix) described it, “The highest ranking, yet still technical, person who can stand in for a line manager if needed.” Because of this, the functions a Director can perform span a wide range of strategic and tactical things. Some companies avoid the Director role completely and instead identify them as “managers of managers.” Others use this role to recognize the stature of people in the industry at large, or to the company (which usually goes hand in hand with being given access to information, decisions, meetings, etc). I’ve even seen the title bestowed to justify compensation of an incoming high-profile hire. A Director at one company might have a far greater number of services or products than a Director at another company. The thing that remains comparable, however, is the amount of responsibility for business impact.
With those caveats in mind, let’s revisit the areas of responsibility for a manager from article above:
An Engineering Manager’s Responsibilities
We can now map the Director’s responsibilities as:
A Director’s Responsibilities
Let’s dive into each one in more detail.
Connecting Your Team’s Work to the Business
Directors translate business goals to inspire and mobilize the organization. At the end of the day, a Director’s job is to help the company be successful. I bet some of you readers are thinking “Hold up, isn’t that everyone’s job?” My answer is “yes, but.” The but being at this level leaders are often privy to information farther out in the future and closer to the bottom-line than they had been previously as a manager. Because of this, Directors have distinct responsibilities to act on that information and to tie the work of their teams back to the bottom line, sometimes even making decisions that seem to go against their own team’s immediate interests. For example Directors are often faced with difficult decisions around compensation and headcount, engagement with vendors, or other things that can significantly impact budget allocations. Managers, on the other hand, are working within those predefined budgets, adjusting things like team expenses, compensation adjustments, vendor hour allocations, and so on.
Some examples of ways in which Directors help tie their teams’ work back the company’s bottom line are:
- Pass down context and goals from execs/VPs, helping their leaders translate them into team-level importance
- Setting direction for their teams using this context and goals
- Passing up key information to execs/VPs to help inform company strategy and goals
- Connecting with stakeholders and having a deep understanding of how the company will succeed and coaching their managers to do the same
- Able to step in for any function their managers would do
(This work is often represented in frameworks such as OKRs, S.M.A.R.T. Goals, or other KPI-based organizational alignment.)
Directors design the organization to support their part in the company’s success — mapping budgets and people to priorities and keeping their teams honest. For example, a Director might have several managers reporting to them; these managers are usually responsible for related products or services or might represent layers of functionality of a product or service. When looking more broadly at company objectives, a Director can see each person in their reporting chain flexibly, able to help any other team as needed, whereas a manager may see someone on their team as “their resource.” Because of this, it is often hard for a manager to see the benefits of moving people between teams as needed.
Similarly, a Director knows that for every project they say yes to, it means they are saying no to something else implicitly. A manager, often not exposed to all the competing constraints, on the other hand, might be tempted to think “if I can just get more headcount then I can do it all”. For managers it can be difficult, almost by design, to see outside their local viewpoint to understand the larger patterns and constraints they are a part of. These constraints can be felt when it comes to asking for additional headcount, changes in compensation for their team, promotions for their team, approved expenses, etc. Directors are able to zoom out to look across teams and also level-set with peer Directors to ensure each decision is in the best interest of the company.
Some example of how Directors might accomplish this are:
- Judging the use of these resources across conflicting priorities and load balancing resources across domains
- Upholding local decisions in the best interest of company
- Coaching their managers through “build” versus “buy” decisions
- Negotiating deals with vendors as needed
- Balancing short versus long-term benefits of technical strategy or people decisions
- Constantly evaluating why their teams are doing what they are doing
Coaching Delivering Results Through Leaders
At the Director level, leadership becomes much more about influence and asking the right questions than “directing people’’ — they are even further away from the final output of the team than the developer or line manager. Because of this, Directors are looking for signals and patterns much more than details. Their main responsibilities are to help their managers be as successful as possible, so their teams are able to achieve their goals. Directors have often spent years as line managers and probably excelled at it. They can use this experiential knowledge to help their managers grow.
Examples of what Directors might be doing in support of growing and coaching managers are:
- Growing managers into strategic thinkers and excellent people leaders
- Holding managers accountable for results
- Holding managers accountable for team morale, hiring, diversity, inclusion, and retention
- Holding managers accountable for technical strategy and technology choices
Having great relationships with other leaders in the company is a critical responsibility. This facilitates effective collaboration across organizations to achieve goals that are large and complex. Directors also need to have great judgment and excel at decision making. To demonstrate excellent judgment and collaboration skills, Directors might be:
- Tracking and de-risking large, complex projects that their managers are executing on
- Aligning interdependent roadmaps by sorting through complexity, connecting dots and seeing around corners
- Nurturing healthy relationships across the company to help create a mental map of the teams and people who get things done
- Exhibiting 1–3 year thinking
Finally, when it comes to the culture of an organization, the buck stops here. For a Director, you are expected to be a steward of the company culture. This means upholding the values but also helping shape and influence culture shifts. In many cases, you are the face of the company and can represent the company at conferences, panels, interviews, etc. As a Director, you are expected to recruit and retain the best people using this visibility. Some example expectations in support of this are:
- Being an active member of the technical community and recruiting those hard to land candidates (as well as identifying people on your team to delegate this to)
- Modeling the culture as well as helping to change it when needed
- Breaking silos and digging into tricky people issues
- Taking accountability for team culture at all levels
Self Care
I would be remiss if I ended this article without touching on the topic of self care. As much as some might think self care goes without saying, I feel it’s important to highlight this topic in the lens of its impact on emotional agility and resilience.
Being a leader is incredibly stressful. Kit Colbert described it as “swinging a lasso” where the leader is in the center and their org is at the periphery being swung around wildly. Each good and bad day can have lasting impacts on those around you. With this much scrutiny coming from above and below, the tone and attitude of a leader will impact their organization in ways that can not be underestimated. Because of this, it is even more important for leaders to find ways to practice self care so that they can show up at their best. This is true for managers but even more so for Directors because as a Director you are expected to be able to be self-reliant. Mekka Okereke remarked “a Director is senior enough that no one above asks much how you’re doing, and no one below does either”.
Taking care of yourself is as much a part of your job as any of the other functions listed above. Your teams depend on it.
Summary
My goal in writing this article is to paint a picture of how the functions a Director might perform are distinctly different from a manager. In many ways, Directors are the glue between execution and strategy; grappling with the most complexity and transforming that complexity into a vision. Every company will be different but using the framework and categories in this post, along with the example activities listed, can provide you with an idea of what some companies might expect from their Directors. Often the best way to know what the expectations are for someone at this level at a specific company is to observe those whose influence is felt at that company.
Thank you for reading this. I’d love to hear about some of the expectations you’ve come across. Please feel free to drop them in the comments section.
Special thanks to Matt Trunnel, Mekka Okereke, Brad Moore, Cameron Gray and Derek Perez for sharing their thoughts and feedback on this article.
