The 3 Pillars of Engineering Leadership
Want to lead an engineering team? Read on to learn about the key aspects.
Introduction
Every programmer knows that feeling of satisfaction when you finish building something and ship it. It’s fulfilling to create something from nothing, and then see your creation taken up by users in the real world.
Making the transition from engineer to engineering leader may mean giving up that feeling. As you grow in seniority, you’ll probably see your code in the wild less and less often. Not everyone is willing to give up that immediate kick, but taking on the reins of leadership brings its own kind of satisfaction. The scope of your impact becomes much wider, and you get to see the people on your team grow and (hopefully) benefit from your leadership.
Why Engineering Leadership Matters
If you’ve worked under toxic leadership — and most engineers have — you know how it goes: the team starts to fall apart as the most talented programmers quickly jump ship, while those who remain are either already checked out, aren’t good enough to find another job, or stay just for the money.
In contrast, an effective leader that can motivate their team with appreciation, a shared vision, and a sense of belonging can drive incredibly successful projects by working within the constraints of the team’s strengths and weaknesses. You don’t need superstar programmers to build great products, but you do need great leadership to get the best out of individuals and teams.
Cultivating Engineering Leadership & Innovation
Given the difference engineering leadership can make, the natural question to ask is how to encourage it. For most engineers, analytical skills come naturally because we tend to think in terms of problem solving. That works really well in most cases as an individual, and it’s definitely where you want the majority of your organization to be, but the problem is that it doesn’t scale. If you need to solve a larger, more abstract set of problems, the kind that you can build a business around, you need people who can work with others to manage projects, deliver products, and motivate a team by creating a vision that inspires people.
There’s a tendency within software engineering to value the technical work that goes into a product above all else. Making a deliberate investment in growing your engineering leadership may take away from that in the short term: the time they spend developing their engineering leadership skills is time they could be spending on the next build.
It’s a tradeoff but, at least for Wave, it’s an easy one to make.
As we see it, if you’re not investing in long-term growth by encouraging engineering leadership, you’ll end up struggling in the short-term as well. If our leaders can’t scale and we don’t have well-run teams, whatever short-term gains we might hope to make by focusing exclusively on the technical problems will be undermined. Even if your teams are building amazing solutions in isolation, if those solutions don’t fit into the product or company vision as a whole, they’re pointless.
You might have heard of the Peter Principle, which states that organizations tend to promote people to their maximum level of incompetence. See if this sounds familiar: the best programmer on your team gets promoted because of their technical achievements, but quickly finds themselves overwhelmed due to their lack of soft skills, i.e., their ability to manage people.
That’s why Wave, like most companies, offers two separate tracks for advancement: mastery and leadership. Not everyone wants to be a leader; you could be really successful in the mastery track and go from software engineer to senior engineer, to staff, to principal. You’ll certainly still need people skills as you grow, but if you really shine at bringing out the best in others, the leadership track might be for you. And for people who choose the leadership track, Wave provides many different tools to help start their leadership journey effectively while feeling supported.
The 3 Pillars of Engineering Leadership
Giving your people the space to explore their potential career paths is a necessary part of growing engineering leadership in an organization, but it’s not sufficient. Developing not just good but great engineering leaders ultimately comes down to three things: People, Technology, and Planning.
People
From hiring the right people, to giving them the right tasks, to finding the right motivation, to developing and growing them, talent management is the core of engineering leadership (in fact, any leadership).
No matter how many interviews you’ve had, nothing can fully prepare you for being on the other side of the table. As a new team lead, working closely with HR and leaning on the experience of other leaders within the organization can help with learning the hiring process and talent assessment.
Working with your team on their career development plans is something I’ve noticed even seasoned leaders struggle with. This is a process that takes a lot of investment and involves talent assessment, regular and transparent feedback, an understanding of what drives others, and a true desire to help them grow.
Matching the right people with the right jobs is another aspect of talent management that takes a bit of learning. This is usually an area where new leads get support from their managers and something that most intermediate to senior leaders need to be good at.
Finding ways to motivate your team is probably the most difficult aspect of people management, since it requires a lot of emotional intelligence and that’s a skill with which engineers often have less practice and development due to the general focus on problem solving and analytical skills. Motivating and inspiring others is a skill that you need to cultivate through learning, reflection and getting coaching and feedback..
Technology
The best engineering leaders are able to combine an organization’s overall vision for the business with a specific technical vision for the product. This involves working with stakeholders within and across technical teams, as well as other areas of the business, such as product management, customer experience, sales, marketing etc. It also involves making sure that your current systems are maintained and are scaling appropriately, which can sometimes be more difficult than building new features as the product and systems scale.
Most engineers assume that the technical aspects of leadership will come easily because they’ve worked on building systems themselves. However, that familiarity can be a trap for new leaders who end up focusing too much on the technical details rather than delegating them to their team.
Part of being a technical leader, especially as you grow in seniority, is understanding that you won’t have the technical depth to fully grasp every technology or tool your teams are using. What’s more important is understanding the cost tradeoffs, the systems/products and how they fit into the business and its ecosystem. That means you’ll need to be comfortable with not knowing everything. You will need to learn how to ask the right questions and who to rely on to fill in the details. As a technical leader, you will need to provide the right parameters for technical decision making that would require you to have a different mindset of operating at the intersection of technology (which is a means to an end) and the cost associated with it.
Planning and Organization
Planning and organization is an aspect of engineering leadership that’s often underappreciated, especially by those who are just starting.
Even if you have the right people working on the right projects and you’ve learned whose judgement to trust on which technologies, you’ll still need organizational skills to put it all together. Some people rely on their own managers or people on their team to supplement their lack of planning experience, but that can only get you so far. If you want to lead teams effectively, understanding how to prioritize, when and how to put process and structure in place and how to plan and organize projects is key. Prioritization can be challenging due to conflicting priorities from different stakeholders. Engaging with the different stakeholders is important to understand their different needs and perspectives and translate those into clear priorities for the technical teams. Even with self-organizing agile teams, the engineering leader still must translate sprint/backlog into milestones and deliverables that the rest of the business can understand.
The good news is that if you’ve taken ownership of projects in the past as part of a team, you’ll have a head start when it comes to leading a team of your own. At Wave, we encourage every engineer and provide opportunities for them to lead projects within their team.
People, Technology & Planning in Engineering Leadership
Whether you’re talking about a technical role or not, good leaders know how to hire the right talent, coach and inspire them, and ensure that they’re set up to succeed in their roles. If any one of these components is missing, your team is not going to be successful.
The managers I’ve worked with who inspired me knew how to manage people as well as problems; they were calm and empathetic, able to catch the nuances of what drove their people, as well as what was bothering them. The best leaders I’ve seen have very high levels of emotional intelligence in addition to problem solving skills and know where to go deep into a problem and where to let other people take it on themselves.
You might not get that same sense of satisfaction from shipping code that you did when you started your career, but the rewards that come from effectively leading a team are well worth the trade-off.
This is the first of a three-part series on engineering leadership. The following parts will discuss making the transition from a senior engineer to a leadership role and how to balance the demands of leadership and technical skills/knowledge.
