Should managers be strong technically?
Management is mostly a “people” job. It is about solving problems so that other people can solve domain specific technical problems to get things done. Communicating, hiring, motivating, building relationships, influencing — these and many other critical aspects of a managers’s job are all people oriented. This becomes even more true for people who are further away from individual contributors in the management hierarchy, for example, people who manage other managers.
Given this, it’s natural to wonder if managers even need to be technical in their domain. However, despite the job of a manager being strongly people oriented, most people would readily agree that a manager needs to have (or quickly acquire) some domain expertise to be effective (e.g. non-engineers should not manage engineers). This view point also makes sense intuitively — some domain familiarity is required to even understand what people in the team are doing. Let us try to make this intuition a little more concrete and enumerate some ways in which technical strength can help a manager be more effective:
Attracting, hiring, and retaining talent
- Many people want to work with the domain experts of their field. As a result, someone’s technical strength can make it easier for them to attract top talent.
- Everyone has a threshold above which they can’t discriminate between the technical strength of other people. This threshold is proportional to their own technical strength. For instance, Yishan Wong believes that people often can not distinguish between someone who is 3x as good as them from someone is 9x as good as them. As a result, managers who are technically strong can do a better job of assessing the people they are interviewing. This enables them to hire stronger people on average.
- Technical strength helps a manager earn the trust and respect of people in their team. This additional trust acts as a safety cushion and can be debited in difficult times (e.g. when a manager needs to push for a decision that their team doesn’t agree with or when they need to take over a project that is not going well). This gives them a slight but important edge in retaining talent.
Growing and managing talent
- Technically stronger managers have a better handle on evaluating and ranking people in their team based on the quality of their work. This allows them to identify and get rid of poor performers quickly.
- More importantly, this also allows them to selectively promote the best people in the team. This alone has HUGE second order positive effects on the team— top people don’t leave after getting disappointed on being side-stepped for a promotion, top people get more leverage so they are able to utilize their strengths at a higher level, good role models are established for everyone in the team etc.
- A technically strong manager can directly mentor and coach people on their team. This helps their team grow more quickly. This feeling of learning and growth also keeps people engaged.
Project prioritization, staffing, and execution
- Someone who understands the domain better has a natural advantage in laying out the team vision/roadmap. This is an important part of managers’ responsibility, especially higher up in the management chain.
- People often have very nuanced technical interests and strengths. A manager with a deeper understanding of the domain can more accurately suss out precise interests of someone. For instance, a software engineer might be interested in database query optimizers and their less technically strong manager could just conclude that they are interested in “database stuff” or for even worse “system design”. A deep nuanced understanding of someone’s interests and strengths can help a manager match them with more appropriate projects, making them more engaged and productive, while ensuring that each project is done by the best possible person in the team.
- Technical strength can give managers an edge in running projects successfully— they can see early signs of a project going off-track or running late and they can also use their expertise to help course-correct projects.
To be fair, technical strength is not the only or even the most important skill required for being a manager. There are plenty of people who are very strong technically but make terrible managers and there are also plenty of excellent managers who aren’t very strong technically. This also varies a lot by the team. For instance, teams that have a very technical charter are better led by technical managers or teams with a lot of other technically strong people can be led by less technical managers too.
Having said this, I do believe that all else being equal, technical strength is extremely valuable for managers in a lot of concrete ways.
People should definitely consider all this while planning their careers. For example, people who want to move into management should consider gaining “sufficient” technical strength before the transition.
People who are already managers should honestly self-assess their technical expertise (they can also directly ask their manager or peers too). If they determine that they aren’t as strong technically as required by the team, here are a few things that they can do:
- Develop trustworthy alternative mechanisms to ensure that good decisions are made in all the conditions described above. This usually involves hiring people on the team who are very strong (though that’s not perfect because a few things like performance evaluation or understanding each person’s interests deeply just can’t be delegated to people on the team)
- Develop a mechanism to steadily grow their technical expertise to match the requirements of the team.
- Set themselves for success by moving to a different team where the required expertise matches that of their own.
Follow-up questions that I plan to address in future posts:
- What are some good ways to quickly grow technical expertise for a manager?
- Is there a minimum domain expertise required to be an effective manager? If yes, how can we define it?
- What type of teams need technically strong managers? Why?
- Given a team, what can we say about the minimum technical bar required to manage that team?
