A Set of Clear Responsibilities for Engineering Mentors
Today, we’re excited to open source our EM Guide! At Unibuddy, we have Engineering Mentors who each manage a team of engineers (a squad). Most other tech companies use the title “Engineering Managers”; the difference for us is that we want to place emphasise on the mentoring aspect of the role and less focus on the “line manager” aspect which is a remnant of the industrial age where “managers” were responsible for a production line in a factory floor hence a “line manager”.
It’s critical to clearly define what the responsibilities are regardless of what the ‘M’ stands for in ‘EM’ for you, and that’s why we have taken a lot of time to define and simplify these responsibilities. Creating something that is simple to use is always complex, and that’s why we’re open sourcing this, we hope other engineering organisations can use it and build on top of it.
It’s important to note that depending on your team structure, context and way of working; the usefullness of this guide will vary — adapt, modify and re-structure it accordingly to work for you!
The Guide
If you want to go straight to the EM Guide, you can find the public Google Doc here.
You can also download the PDF here.
Three Broad Categories of Responsibilities
In summary, there are three critical aspects that an EM is responsible for.
- People
- Delivery
- Tech Vision
Under each of those aspects, we define the various activities and responsibilies that are important based on our engineering identity and way of working. You will want to tweak these based on your way of working.
Responsibilities
We tabulated the responsibilities into the three categories. Some of these are very specific to initiatives that we’ve implemented such as “Personal Project Time” where engineers get two weeks to work on any project they want to that’s outside of anything company related. The initiatives will vary across companies but generally the purpose should be similar i.e. to improve team culture, L&D, retention etc.
KPIs
The responsibilities and suggested activites are only the “how”, in fact an experienced EM may not find it very useful and may have their own style so the most important point is to have a measure of success for EMs. The “how” can evolve and should evolve. So we defined a KPI for each of the three categories. This is what you ultimately want to see going in the right direction.
That’s it! We’d love your feedback - comment on the post or email us at tech@unibuddy.com. If you’re interested in joining our amazing team at Unibuddy, check our openings.
