The three perspectives of a software engineering manager

After many years of managing and leading teams, I’ve split my perspectives into three areas that allow me to excel and improve in my role. Each one of the areas requires different skills and mindsets. The first perspective relates to the team. The second one relates to outside the team, while the third one relates to your superiors. In this post, I want to share how I think these perspectives can help a Senior Engineer, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager grow and become successful.

For the first perspective — your team, the experience is the foundation on which you must build, and one important brick on top of this foundation is people skills. You can easily get more technical skills and knowledge, but that won’t help you much without knowing how to work with people. And that’s where coaching becomes crucial to you and your team’s development.

For the second perspective, outside the team, that’s when technical knowledge becomes important. Technical knowledge differs from technical skills because you don’t need to execute, but your team needs to. And that execution is part of a bigger context (other teams, other departments, etc.). For example, if you are managing a Back-end development team, your team will most likely collaborate with Frontend or Infrastructure teams. The way you and the other teams' managers communicate…