From Frontend Engineer to Engineering Manager: Three lessons learned over the first four months
In this article, I want to talk about the three lessons I have learned over the last four months as I made the move from Frontend Engineer to Engineering Manager, namely: start by building a relationship of trust with your team, use your calendar to protect your time, and actively seek feedback on your progress. But first, a quick detour into why engineering management, and how Marshmallow allowed me to grow and supported me along the way.
From the Frontend to People Management
Over the last two years, I’ve been weighing up where I should take my career as a Frontend Engineer. I have dabbled in Product Management, spent a tense few months as interim Head of Product Delivery for an early-stage pet food startup as we raced towards a looming deadline, and moved back into frontend engineering for Marshmallow, a London-based startup with a mission of building a world where insurance benefits everyone.
After all of that, I learned that I didn’t want to give up coding and I loved getting my hands dirty building a product, but that I also enjoyed the people side of engineering and wanted to take my career in that direction. So when I interviewed at Marshmallow, and throughout my later 1–2–1s with our CTO, David Goate, I made sure to express my interest in taking my career down the people management path.
To my surprise, Marshmallow’s initial commitment to supporting career progression proved to be more than recruitment hyperbole and six months later, when a business need arose, David offered me the chance to take on the responsibility of managing four engineers. Going from being accountable for only my development to supporting engineers ranging from a recent hire to a Senior Technical Lead was an exciting, if panic-inducing, challenge that I eagerly accepted.
Thankfully, this new challenge was made easier by being able to move into engineering management gradually. I started as an Engineering Coach (i.e. a Junior Engineering Manager) with the responsibility for coaching my reports but without the direct responsibility for conducting performance reviews and hiring new engineers. Four months later and I am about to start conducting performance reviews and interviewing candidates and I am on the cusp of completing my move from Frontend Engineer to Engineering Manager.
The last few months have gone very quickly, which is not surprising as my move to people management coinciding with a pandemic and a UK-wide lockdown. I’ve had to get used to running 1–2–1s remotely and learn how to build trust with a team who now only see you over Zoom. I’ve also had to learn how to balance my time. Between team meetings, individual 1–2–1s and general admin, people management can quickly break up your day into small chunks leaving little time to code. In what follows, I want to build on the support that David and Marshmallow have given me and pass on three lessons I’ve learned in the last four months on how to make the move to engineering management a little bit smoother.
Start by building a relationship of trust
When Marshmallow first allowed me to take on responsibility for coaching four engineers I did what any other excited, yet apprehensive junior manager would do and read everything I could on managing people. From Michael Lopp’s brilliant Managing Humans to The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier, they all emphasised that the most important first step for any junior manager is to build a relationship of trust with her reports.
As I was being promoted from a team member to a line manager I thought it would be particularly important to spend the first couple of 1–2–1s re-getting to know everyone on the team. So during the first week, I took each engineer out for coffee and a chat (this was in March before lockdown became our new reality). This quickly paid dividends as it was an opportunity for me to get to know each person a bit better: where they came from, companies they had enjoyed working for, and equally those that they were glad they’d left. It also allowed me to communicate to them that I was new to management and that I would be learning as much from them as they would be from me.
I believe that opening up in a very direct and honest way allowed me to move past the “well this is awkward” stage of making a lateral move from team member to line manager. I’d be lying if I said that this change in relationship dynamic was not one of my major concerns in the first few weeks. However, I found that showing humility, and expressing how much I wanted to learn about being a good manager helped reframe the relationship in a more collaborative way. I was there to help them grow and develop as engineers and they would, in turn, help me become a better manager.
The second lesson I learned in building a relationship of trust came a month later when we all left the office and joined a lot of the UK moving to work from home in the face of the increasing threat of COVID-19. Don’t take fine at face value, dig deeper.
Along with the new challenge of conducting every meeting via Zoom or Google Meet I was faced with a further challenge of trying to build a relationship with each engineer without being privy to the contextual cues each person gives off when in person. Normally when face-to-face with another person their body language gives them away. So when Frank (not a real person) says “I’m fine”, yet his body language gives off the message “I’m absolutely not fine, but I’m not sure how to talk about it”, you know to dig a bit deeper. This is much harder when Frank is on a video chat from his bedroom and his body language could be either signalling a problem I need to dig into or that he’s using a chest of drawers as a desk because he, like everyone else in London, was unprepared for working from home full-time. (That being said, Marshmallow’s recent addition of a work from home budget helped us all buy the equipment we need to make working from home easier.)
As a consequence of this, I quickly learned not to take “I’m fine” at face value and to encourage my reports to open up by opening up more myself. It’s hard for an engineer to admit that the unexpected move to working fully remotely has been harder than expected. However, I found that if I led the conversation by admitting to things I was struggling with: sharing a one-bedroom flat with my wife who also works for a startup, finding privacy to make Zoom calls, and keeping my cat from biting my laptop screen, then they would be more willing to open up about what they were struggling with.
Finally, a relationship of trust is strengthened when you follow through on your promises. Once you’ve gotten to know your reports, and they’ve opened up to you, you’re in a position to help them address whatever issue is bothering them, or encourage them to grasp whatever opportunity is in front of them. If you say you’re going to help an engineer obtain the budget to sign-up for a co-working space, you have to do it. If you say you’re going to take on smaller, less interesting work so an engineer can focus on a more exciting project, you have to follow through. That is how you maintain an ongoing relationship of trust.
Your calendar is your best friend (how to find the time to code)
Building a relationship of trust with your reports is important but can and will be a time-consuming exercise. As an engineer, you will be used to encouraging people to cancel meetings so you can set aside quiet time to focus on building a feature. Now that you’re a junior manager, meetings take on a whole new purpose. They are your primary way of taking the pulse of the team. However, as an Engineering Manager, you will still be expected to contribute as an engineer and support your team by building features.
The second lesson I learned in my first four months as a manager is that your calendar is your best friend. The best way to manage your time and strike a good balance between meeting overload and focused time is to group as many of your 1–2–1s as possible, block out afternoons or full days to focus on feature work, and be ruthless about which meetings you agree to attend.
As a manager, your most important meetings are your 1–2–1s. After some experimentation with fortnightly, 60-minute meetings I settled on having more regular 30-minute weekly meetings. This worked particularly well. Ever since the company went fully remote fortnightly catch-ups felt too far apart, yet having an hour every week felt like overkill.
I also tried to group these weekly catch-ups on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon as the engineers expressed that they would be more creative in the morning and would prefer to use that time to build features. Limiting these catch-ups to a couple of afternoons a week helped prevent them from breaking up the day too much. I also arranged them with a 30-minute gap between each one to allow for typing up notes or preparing for the next one.
After you’ve grouped your regular 1–2–1s the next step is to block off time to code. In my team we started doing this a few months ago by restricting meetings on a Wednesday, giving everyone a full day of distraction-free work. This helps and provides an oasis in the middle of the week where you are guaranteed a solid eight hours to get your teeth into a feature. If you are able then it is worth seeing where else you can do this during the week. Can you block off Monday afternoons to focus on work? How about Friday mornings? Once I started using my calendar to protect my time I found myself more able to balance people management and coding without seeing either take too much of a hit to my productivity.
Lastly, don’t underestimate the performance review (or the probation review). A good performance review involves feedback from the engineer’s peers and to provide a good review you will have to arrange for feedback forms to be sent out to the relevant people, collect the responses, digest the feedback and add to it yourself before presenting it back to the engineer. That’s a lot of work.
Block off time at the beginning of the week to prepare the review documents. Send out the feedback forms first thing on Monday and encourage the responders to complete the forms over the next three days. If your feedback form is reasonable most people should be able to complete it in less than 15 minutes, however, we all get distracted and so three days gives you plenty of time to chase up that one missing form. Once your forms are in, block off time to digest the feedback and add your thoughts to the review. Do this the day before so you are not rushing on Friday and have ample time to consider any next steps.
As a junior manager, your calendar is your friend. Use it defensively to block off time to code, use it to reserve time to prepare for performance reviews and 1–2–1s, and use it to organise your week to reduce context switching and help you maintain a good balance between people management and coding.
Learn to love and seek feedback
Marshmallow supported my move into engineering management both by giving me the opportunity but also in structuring the move in such a way that it would be harder for me to fail. By first moving from Frontend Engineer to Engineering Coach, I could build a relationship with my reports before having to review their performance. This allowed me to build a much better relationship with my reports than I believe I would have been built if I went from peer to “responsible for their next promotion” in a matter of a few days.
This staged transition also allowed me to reach out to my manager, David, for support and regular feedback so that I could course-correct if I was prioritising the wrong issue, or taking the wrong approach with an engineer. David was quick to point out when I needed to be more direct, or when I needed to back off and see how things developed. He also gave me valuable feedback when I ran my first Probation Review, how to collect feedback from the team and present that feedback, along with my assessment, to an engineer.
As a new manager, I was also able to lean on our Head of People, Lucy, who coaches upcoming leaders at Marshmallow. Every couple of weeks we would meet to discuss how it was going. She provided an invaluable ear when I wanted to bounce around an idea or ask a difficult people management question. She helped me navigate both running Probation Reviews and more recently moving to a new performance management software (15Five) which has reduced the amount of admin I have to handle as a junior manager.
After three months on the job, I had my first Performance Review as an Engineering Coach. Having had support from David and Lucy I felt confident that I had learned a lot and performed well in my new role. There were no surprises and the feedback I received from both my team and from David recognised my strengths and pointed out areas I could improve on that I was aware of and working towards addressing. With feedback and support from David and Lucy, I felt like I had a much higher chance of performing well as an Engineering Coach in the coming weeks and in taking on the role of Engineering Manager soon after.
From the Frontend to People Management
I have learned a lot as I transitioned from Frontend Engineer to Engineering Coach. Stepping back from feature work and embracing a new challenge has been a fantastic experience and one I credit Marshmallow with allowing me to undertake. It is their commitment to investing in their engineering team’s individual career development that allowed me to dip my toes into the next chapter in my career with the greatest chance for success.
Looking back at the last four months I learned three very valuable lessons right out of the gate. First, start as you mean to go on, by building a relationship of trust with your new reports. Open up to them and learn to listen. Follow up on your conversations and deliver on any promises you’ve made. Second, protect your time and learn how to strike a good balance between coding and people management. Befriend your calendar and use this to reserve time for what is important, both preparing for 1–2–1s and carving out time to build features. Finally, actively seek feedback. Whether it is from your manager or a mentor, look for constructive feedback so that you can grow quickly and learn how to be a better manager.
