Starting From Scratch: Engineering Management At Uncountable

Many software engineering orgs have a dual advancement ladder, with both individual contributor (IC) and management paths for engineers to grow into over the course of their careers. As a result, engineers often have a thoughtful answer ready if you ask which career path they’d like to pursue in the long term. At the same time, I’ve also found that early- and mid-career engineers often have the mistaken belief that they need to be a perfect senior engineer before they can succeed in an engineering management (EM) role.

We’re currently making our first external engineering manager hire at Uncountable [Apply Here]. We’re considering both first-time and experienced managers for this position, so with aspiring managers in mind, I’ve decided to write about what skills a new engineering manager does (and doesn’t) need to succeed at a startup like ours.

Introduction: Management Priorities

As a full-time IC engineer, technical contribution is your core competency. If you’re knocking it out of the park building features, cleaning up code and systems, and responding quickly to customers hitting bugs, this is a great sign: you’re probably creating a lot of value for customers and for the company. In contrast, if a full-time manager is one of the biggest technical contributors on the team, something is probably going wrong — they should be focusing on management tasks that accelerate their reports.

Since a manager’s highest leverage daily task is accelerating their team, individual technical skill is no longer the most important prerequisite for the role, and they’re not “leveling up” from an IC position. In fact, an engineer moving onto a full-time management role is not getting a promotion: they’re starting a new job from scratch. The new manager will need a new set of skills for this role that they drew upon rarely, if ever, as an IC engineer. At the same time, they’ll need to reach into the IC toolbox from time to time as they make judgment calls and work closely with their reports. For the rest of this blog, I’ll cover the new skills a first-time EM will need to develop in order to succeed.

The EM toolkit

Although it’s important, weekly engineering output by the team isn’t the only way to measure an EM’s contribution to the company. In the long run, retention and motivation of employees is more important than endlessly optimizing short-term engineering output. A manager needs to create a great working environment and a positive culture on their team. Their negative or positive contributions to the working environment will not only affect their reports, but also the broader engineering organization, the company as a whole, and the team’s external reputation as a great place to work.

If everyone on a manager’s team is operating at peak productivity, that’s great. However, if engineers are burning out, frustrated in meetings, and even considering leaving the company, then the high engineering velocity won’t last long. A lot of the work that contributes to retention is less tangible, but everything from a well-timed shoutout to an improved project management process can create an atmosphere where engineers are highly motivated to do their best work and meet the high standards you’re setting for them.

Mentoring and career development is another important responsibility. Positioning your team to succeed with their existing set of skills and knowledge is step 1, but an effective manager is always planning how their reports can be more effective in 6 months than they are today. This could mean:

- Strategic project selection: Emily is stronger on backend than frontend, so we’ll assign her a new plotting project instead of a database design project

- Generating learning opportunities: Pairing up junior and senior engineers on projects, guiding the code review process, organizing tech talks and other education

- Active mentoring: Taking an hour to sit down with a new hire and train them on code review

- Giving feedback: Make sure Joe knows that his attention to detail on a recent, highly visible feature was worth the effort; but his pace on MVP projects isn’t fast enough to get early feedback.

- Advocating for engineers: Communicating each engineer’s strengths and successes to leadership, and advocating for them appropriately in review and advancement discussions

While senior engineers and tech leads may take on some of these tasks, none of them are core competencies for an IC engineer, so a new manager should expect to focus on expanding their skills in these areas during their first 6 months.

At Uncountable, we ask engineers to take a big role in project management and prioritization of their own individual tasks. However, not every company is the same: many teams use a structured Agile process to assign and prioritize tasks across the team, and others have dedicated project or program managers. So a new manager may be coming in with a lot of project management experience, a little bit, or none at all.

In any case, they’ll have plenty of chances to sharpen their skills at tracking projects, planning timelines, and making judgment calls. Every week, a manager at Uncountable might be tracking 10–100 tasks of different scopes, and making calls about who should work on them, how long they’ll take, and even when to kill projects that have gone off the rails.

To inform all of these decisions, they’ll need an understanding of the larger business value and urgency of each project. That means spending time with product and business development teams to understand the direct revenue and intangible opportunities associated with each engineering task, along with any relevant timelines. They’ll also need to perform communication in the other direction, informing the rest of the company about feature and bugfix timelines, based on engineers’ own judgements and measurements of their progress on those tasks.

Finally, upon taking on a management role, you may find that you’ve also taken on a sales role: Building the team is an important responsibility for managers, especially at small companies without a dedicated recruiting organization. Recruiting software engineers is a famously competitive game, and at Uncountable we’ve made the game harder for ourselves by holding ourselves and everyone who joins the team to a high bar.

While many engineers on the team sit in on interviews and even run technical screens, managers have the final responsibility for the recruiting process. This means developing and maintaining a full recruiting funnel: generating marketing collateral, sourcing candidates, reviewing resumes, designing interview questions, and leading interviews. If a candidate does well, they’ll need to sell the hire to the team (including company leadership), and then sell the candidate on joining the team!

This is a long set of responsibilities and it might seem intimidating. Keep in mind the core thesis we have for engineering management at Uncountable: Engineering managers are not the “head engineer”, they’re someone doing a different job completely. You’re not going to have all the skills for a new job on day 1, and it’s okay to feel like you have a lot to learn when starting out.

In my next post in this series, I’ll cover where technical skills do come into play for engineering managers. This includes both support of IC tasks across the company, and new engineering problems related to organizational design and more. I’ll also address the fundamental ambiguity of a role that sits between technical work and people management.

Are you considering in making the switch from engineering work to management? Uncountable is hiring an Engineering Manager for our San Francisco office [Apply Here, or reach out directly to jason@uncountable.com]