Why Engineering Squads Must Be Led by Engineering Managers
This question comes up in start-up organizations all the time.
Who should be leading the engineering squad? It’s a very important question. It has consequences far beyond when the current feature will ship.
More Than Features
Engineering requires more than writing features.
Engineers concern themselves with the ill-named non-functional requirements. These are all the other concerns that fall into Engineering, beyond the features in the software.
Performance. Security. Reliability. Monitoring. Capacity. Scalability. Testing. Maintainability. Readability. Operability.
These critical requirements get overlooked when the team leader comes from a non-technical domain.
Ignoring technical requirements leads to lots of incidents, support requests, bug reports, and a codebase that no engineer looks forward to working with.
Test the Extremes
Imagine a minimal squad composed of a Product Manager, a Designer, and an Engineer. Let’s remove the roles one by one and see what happens to the squad.
When you remove the Product Manager, you lose out on some of the insight that they provide. The team will stop hearing about customer interviews. Engineers may need to step up and help interpret analytics. Things may go a bit slower, but the work can proceed.
When you remove the Designer, the visual design comes to a halt. The Engineer and Product Manager could collaborate on the user experience. Developers can borrow interactions from other applications. Frameworks such as Bootstrap, Material, Tailwind allow an Engineer to develop reasonable designs. Again, things may be rough, but the work can proceed.
When you remove the Engineer, development grinds to a halt. New features cannot be developed. Code cannot be refactored. Bugs cannot be fixed. Your only option is to bring in another engineer.
The Engineer is the linchpin to a software team.
It naturally follows that someone from Engineering should be leading the squad.
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📋 About Milo
I am a tech executive, writer, speaker, entrepreneur, and inventor. I’ve been developing software since 1995 and developing teams for over a decade. 🚀
I write articles about software, engineering, management, and leadership.
You can also follow me on Twitter. 🐦
