Intricacies of Engineering Management

The engineering manager role exists in most established tech companies, but it is sometimes the trickiest role to understand what an engineering manager really does, is it just about people management?

At a very broad level , the Engineering Manager(EM) is the first layer who is responsible for aligning the actual execution line into the company’s vision. Some of the most common challenges an EM faces are keeping their team motivated, improving the performance of the team, providing an environment that fosters growth, creating a strong team culture, mentoring your team, hiring the right talent.

The best EM’s at any company know how to rally their team together to solve problems and to answer technical questions, keep the team energised, manage budgets, and collaborate across the company to build the best products possible. The expectations from Engineering managers are different in different companies depending on the phase in which the company is.

We in Capillary have tried to remove ambiguities and define clear focus areas of an engineering manager. The four focused areas for the role of engineering manager are the following:

Pillars of Engineering Management

People

The #1 job for an engineering manager is to look after the people in the team for optimum performance. Looking after a team is not limited to communication only, it also means supporting and removing roadblocks for the team. Few things which every engineering manager should do from a people management perspective are:

1. Building Trust and team building
2. Establish Personal connects and remove barriers
3. Create a culture of continuous feedback

1.Building Trust and team building

One of the most important part of people management is building your team. As “Kim Scott” in her famous book Radical Candor puts it “Relationships are core to your job”. This includes hiring and maintaining the right/safe environment based on trust.Few things works well when building trust are:

• Communicate your Style and Expectations — Your new report needs to understand your style of working as much as you need to understand his.Set the right expectations with your reports, Expectation setting should be as specific as possible. One way is to define very clear objectives towards the beginning of the calendar year/quarter and revisit these objectives and their progress in 1/1 catch ups.
• Empowering your next level — A big part of engineering leadership is empowering your next level so that they can start picking things from your plate and are also in a position to take decisions without being afraid of failures and and they learn from their mistakes.This also means identifying the strengths and weaknesses of individual members.
• Integrity — Choosing courage over comfort; choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast, or easy; and practicing your values, not just professing them.
• Non Judgment — I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment.
• Reliability — You do what you say you’ll do. At work, this means staying aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t over promise and are able to deliver on commitments and balance competing priorities.

2. Establish Personal connects and remove barriers

1/1’s and skip level meetings are a good way to establish personal connections as well as to remove immediate blockers for your team members. These meetings should be a safe place for your reports to come and talk to you about new ideas, Few things to keep in mind while doing 1/1’s or skip levels are:

• No Status Updates — Do not make the meeting about status updates to you, or from you — those should happen in separate project/product specific meetings.
• Listen more — Let your direct report do most of the talking. Resist the urge to monologue. The goal is to understand their thinking, their worries, concerns, beliefs etc. You can’t make them understand your thinking if you don’t understand theirs first.
• Establish personal connections — Get to know your direct report personally. You should be genuinely interested in the family, personal hopes and fears, and thier interests. If you have trouble remembering these details, it’s okay to keep them written down somewhere.
• Growth conversations — Learn about the career aspirations of your reports, Understand where they see themselves after a year or maybe 5 years, What support you as a manager can provide in reaching these goals, This also means having clear action items on you as a manager and letting your reports know whether you will solve a certain ask or reject it completely. Once committed, provide ETA around that item and then adhere to it, Clarity around growth items are extremely important.

3. Create a culture of continuous feedback

Continuous feedback is a commitment to regularly sharing positive and constructive as well as negative or corrective feedback, One major pitfall of continuous feedback is sometimes we overdo it and it starts going into micromanagement.Here are some steps which can be taken around continuous feedback:

• Know your team — The most important part of providing continuous feedback is understanding the people, Their strengths and weaknesses , At what level they are currently operating and where they might need to improve to go to the next level.
• Observe your people — Paying attention to people is another important thing if you want to provide constructive feedback, Practice looking for talents and achievements and also for obvious gaps in individuals.
• Provide small but regular feedback — Always try starting with positive feedback, this makes your reports more likely to listen to you, This will help you in giving critical feedback later.
• Coaching and Career Development — Continuous feedback can be highly effective if you can combine it with coaching.

Process

The purpose of having processes is for predictability and visibility. Too many processes make the team move slowly, and velocity drops, while the lack of processes add room for chaos. There are few alignments, and no one knows what to expect. Striking a balance is a challenge for the engineering manager; the balance can be subjective depending on who you talk to.

An engineering manager typically works very closely with a technical program manager to improve processes and efficiency, EM’s sometimes enforces processes such as releases, CICD pipeline , coverage numbers, code branching, scrum practices, deployment time reduction,cloud expenses to achieve predictability in software delivery.Something which really helps is a data driven approach, getting all tools and dashboards created to help the team to operate their software, Inefficiency within the team should be backed by data, It is also very important to analyze pattern from this data and see the reasons which led to a dip in uptime, increase in bug SLA’s or an increase in bug count.

It is also important for an EM to sometimes take a step back and observe what is not working for the team. It is like seeing your team play from outside like a football manager, identifying what is not working in the team’s development process. Making new processes is essential, but removing the processes that become meaningless with time is equally important.

Processes are important for an organisation to function and an EM to manage effectively,But, Processes are for people not the other way around.valuing people over process is an indispensable part of Engineering Management.

Technology

Engineering Managers code less or don’t code at all but their technical skills still need to be at a high level, the EM should not be the most technically competent and effective coder in the team, else he/she will be in the wrong role. Although, Maintaining some of these skills will help you in taking better decisions, it helps in coaching your team and also helps in understanding the technical challenges within the team, Here are some of my suggestions for Engineering managers on Technology side:

• Technical Decisions and Breadth- Engineering Managers may have to guide their team to make the right technical decisions. Either way, EMs are accountable for the technical decisions taken by their team. Therefore, it’s crucial for an EM to have the relevant domain knowledge, a track record of making the right tradeoffs, and a sound system of technical decision-making. Technical Breadth of an EM is extremely important as it helps in working on an ideal tech stack for problem areas along with Architects and lead. Em’s should always be in a position to ask the right questions which can facilitate better decisions.
• Problem Solving Skills — When you manage a team, you can expect your team members to come to you for guidance, advice, and decisions. Therefore, problem-solving is a must-have skill for all engineering managers.Em’s deal with problem-solving daily. Constantly working on this indispensable skill allows you to guide your team and the product to excellent results.
• Balance Technical Depth — Although, Technical depth is something an EM shouldn’t be worried, especially if he/she has a larger team to manage about but it helps if you have a smaller team to manage, as it keeps you understand the ground realities well and understand the struggle areas of engineering which in turn in few cases can help in connecting better and understanding their language.
• Tech Evolution — Finally, especially in a field like software, there’s a risk that the industry will “drift” and your knowledge will become stale. So even if you’re in good shape now, it will still require constant investment to maintain your level of understanding.

Product

When it comes to the product side and Engineering Manager needs to compliment the product manager and not compete with them, The product manager typically brings in the business context of the product, while the engineering manager and his team bring in the technical context to bridge the gap in implementation.

Product managers should focus on building the right product, while engineering managers should focus on building the product right.

Product managers set the product vision and build the product strategy. Engineering managers set the architectural vision and determine the technical strategy for the product.

It is extremely important for Engineering managers to understand the product context so that they can comprehend the high level challenges in the implementation. Having product domain knowledge allows the engineering manager to connect the dots between his team members, product scope, technical implementation, quality, delivery timeline, and potential collaboration with other teams.

Conclusion

According to me there are various attributes which makes you a good engineering manager,

• Emotional intelligence and ability to establish trust.
• Ability to manage the team’s motivation.
• Mentoring abilities.
• Ability to make hard decisions and manage conflicts.
• Strong work ethic and cohesion with company culture.
• Technical literacy and problem-solving skills.
• Advocate for change to seek positive evolution in a constant manner.

Also, If someone wants to choose the EM’s path, These are some of the pointers you keep in mind before switching into the role:

• You are genuinely interested in other people’s growth.
• You can bring out the best from the team by giving them the best possible environment to thrive.
• You are capable of maintaining calm when you are facing fire from multiple sides.
• You always align yourself with the bigger picture in most situations.
• You don’t seek to win all the time, sometimes losing is bigger than a win.

I hope this blog was useful in providing an idea of the Engineering Management role and what EM’s really do and the problems they try to solve in organisation's. If you enjoyed this article, share it with your friends and colleagues!

References

1. The Manager’s Path — A beginner level book, A great book on navigating a career path from Individual Contributor to Manager
2. High Output Management — It is about building organisation's and spending your time on the most important tasks for your team.
3. https://brenebrown.com/resources/the-braving-inventory/
4. Creativity, Inc. — a highly readable, ‘human’ (i.e. not dry and bullet-pointy) book about Ed Catmull’s experiences building high performing teams and organisation's at Pixar.
5. First, Break All The Rules — a great, data-driven book that provides a lot of food-for-thought on how to get the best from your people
6. Drive : The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us — understand the underpinnings of intrinsic motivations of good engineers — spoiler alert : “carrots and sticks” don’t work.