From software engineer to engineering manager

What to expect from an Engineering Manager role

Introduction

In the last few years, we are witnessing a lack of software engineers in our industry, but there is an even more serious lack of engineering leaders, especially engineering managers. Being an engineering manager is a challenging, responsible, and sometimes stressful job, but rewarding, especially with the fact that you build, lead, and mentor teams of engineers and coordinate them into the successful delivery of software products.

So, what is the usual career path for an engineering manager, and what you can expect from the role? I have been an engineering manager myself for more than 7 years in my career, in several different companies and organizational structures, so in this blog post, I will share my personal experience and thoughts. So without further ado, let’s start.

The career crossroad

As they progress through their career path, all software engineers at some point come to, as I call it, an engineering career crossroad: should they move towards more organizational and people-oriented leadership positions, like engineering managers, or continue their technical path into roles like software architects and principal engineers?

Definitely, it is not an easy decision to make, because moving from one path to the other in later stages is more complicated than it looks, especially since the responsibilities and day-to-day activities of both roles are significantly different. In the following paragraphs, we will take a closer look at the first option, becoming an engineering manager.

Team Lead

The first step, before becoming an engineering manager, is leading a team of engineers in the role of an engineering team lead. That is a great opportunity for the senior engineers to taste the flavor of engineering leadership roles, since being a team lead touches on some of the responsibilities that an engineering manager usually has. The experience says that engineers that love being team leaders and leading a small group of engineers have the pre-requirements and skills to become great engineering managers, with a lot of hard work and dedication.

Engineering Manager

The next career step for a team lead is becoming an engineering manager. There are different definitions of the engineering manager role in the industry and responsibilities are slightly different from company to company, but generally, these here are the most common responsibilities of an engineering manager:

• build and lead teams of engineers,

• coordinate the technical delivery of their teams,

• set success metrics for their teams,

• collaborate with product owners, product managers, and other stakeholders and help in shaping the product roadmap,

• set the technical strategy and vision for their teams,

• create the organizational structure of their teams, open new positions, and are responsible for setting up and leading the hiring process for the open roles,

• they grow and mentor the engineers and help them move to the next ladder in their engineering careers.

• sometimes, they deal with finances, and prepare, request, present, and justify budgeting plans.

Let’s see what a senior engineer who has experience in team or tech lead positions can expect from the engineering manager role:

Code less, present more

Being an engineering manager means spending less time in your favorite IDE coding and spending more time preparing documents, charts, tables, and slides.

Also, it means being part of a lot of meetings and interacting with different people in the organizations, starting from other engineering managers, and product managers to C-level executives, clients, and investors.

So, if you have solid communication and presentation skills and you like presenting at meetings and communicating with a lot of people, it is definitely a good sign that the engineering manager role is right for you.

People management

People management is a big part of the daily activities of engineering managers. They usually lead from 10 up to 20-25 engineers distributed in several teams with appropriate team leads. This doesn’t mean that you will be constantly working with all engineers on a daily basis. Engineering managers usually work and cooperate daily with the team leads, but they do monthly or quarterly catchups and 1:1s with all engineers in their teams. One of the responsibilities of the engineering manager is to grow and mentor the engineers, set the right evaluation process, and help the engineers to progress in their engineering careers.

Hiring Process

Hiring the right people for their teams is the responsibility of the engineering managers. This means setting up a hiring process that will be able to identify the candidates that have not only great technical skills, but their personality and soft skills are the right fit for the team and the organization in general.

Technical strategy and processes

As I mentioned before, engineering managers do very less or no coding at all. But, they are responsible for the technical vision and design for the product, the technical documentation, and the release process, and depending on the size of the whole engineering team, they create or participate in creating the architecture of the product.

They also are responsible for setting up the right processes and software development methodologies for their teams and automating them as much as possible.

Being responsible for something doesn’t mean doing everything by yourself. Great engineering managers make sure to always get input and ideas from the team leads and engineers they are leading.

Priority of work and technical dept

Although the product management team sets the priority of work for the engineering teams, the engineering manager has a big say in what will come next, depending on the capacity of the team and the priority requested by the stakeholders.

Let’s not forget the technical dept, and balancing it, compared with the development of new features, is very important for the engineering manager. Doing some technical tradeoffs during building a product is an unavoidable part of the process and it is the responsibility of the engineering manager to decide when these debts will be repaid and to properly present the reasons, cost, and benefits to the stakeholders.

Always be there for your team

Great engineering managers are always there for the engineers in their teams, no matter if it is for resolving some technical challenge, conflict in the team, or supporting the team during doing long night hot-fixes.

Being able to mentor, support and grow the engineering members of your teams, set their career goals, and help them to find the right direction is one of the best perks when it comes to being an engineering manager.

Constantly learn and self-develop

This is important for all engineers in general, to constantly stay up to date with the latest technologies, frameworks, and trends. But, additionally, as an engineering manager, you need to make sure to develop your leadership and soft skills by listening to relevant podcasts, reading engineering leadership blogs and books, and visiting conferences. And most importantly, implement the new skills and findings in the day-to-day work of your teams.

Summary

In most cases, all successful engineering managers (with some exceptions) were software engineers in the past. So, if you are a senior software engineer and the thoughts mentioned in this post seem interesting to you, with hard work, dedication, and constant learning, you have great potential to become a successful software engineering manager. One thing is sure, the list of open job positions for this role is huge.