First cut: Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager
This is a reflection or retrospection and an attempt to share the takeaways of my journey so far. I started officially as an Engineering Manager in the last 8 months. Before that, I was acting as a Tech Lead, just got promoted to Staff Software Engineer.
I have been in the information technology industry for the last 10+ years and one of the things that were pretty clear to me since the beginning was that my personality is more people-oriented and I like to talk to people, engage with them along with spending time on solving technological problems.
Few people see moving to a management role as a promotion but I always looked at it as a new role starting from ground zero and thus I need to be mindful of what needs to change in my daily routine/responsibilities going forward. I knew right off the bat that if I don’t change anything then I’ll be shooting myself in the foot.
As an individual contributor, I was exposed to only technical problems but on the flip side, I’d be exposed to Products, People, Processes, and Technical Problems (Yes, you read that right!).
Trust and Culture
Trust is a very important element in order to succeed as a team and thus it was important for me to plug myself into team members’ daily tasks and understand their concerns. The recurring 1:1s is a very useful tool in order to address these problems. I try to keep all team communications open and transparent.
Lead with Context
Another challenge being in this role is you need to be technical, understand the technology and more importantly need to understand how that technology is intertwined into a product and define usage pattern and user experience for the customers. This ability gives an extra strength to lead the team in the right direction and get us to the desired outcome.
Stakeholder Management
When I stepped into this role, stakeholder management became a day 1 operation for me as in getting alignment across the teams, unblocking upstream/downstream services, UX/Product Management team’s ever-changing requirements, and aligning priorities and deadlines. This seems difficult to achieve but with a great team, strong processes, and a sense of ownership within the teams, it definitely made it easier.
Delegation
Moving from IC to Manager, one thing was pretty clear to me that I can not do everything on my own and if I’m going the same IC route, then I won’t be fair to my role and also not setting the team for success. I viewed my role now as a guard rail on the bowling alley whose job is to make sure the ball does not go into the gutter and redirect it back onto the target. It’s ever important to take a step back and let the technical lead take the ownership and not try to be the smartest person in the room. The more you listen, the better it gives others an opportunity to grow.
Be Aware and Stay ahead
As an engineering manager, you receive information from the top, down, left, right and at the same time, questions come too. Since the teams are distributed geographically, it’s important to be aware and document everything in order to keep all information up to date and everyone on the same page. This really helped me fill those communication edge gaps and unblocked the team from time to time.
