Trailer for the talk
Here's a sneak peek of the talk: Through Dhruv's sharing, understand the expectations of an Engineering Manager to decide your career track!
About the talk
Ever wondered what consumes a manager's day? What will your life become if you chose to be a manager? In this session, we will talk about the roles and responsibilities of engineering managers, what they do, and how they impact the organisation. At the end of this session, we will do a hands-on exercise to see whether this is the right role for you or not.
This talk will cover
- What does an Engineering Manager do for their people?
- What does an Engineering Manager do for the product?
- How does an Engineering Manager do to set processes?
- Is this the right role for you?
We’ll use Zoom meeting to hold and record the event. Register to the event to access recordings afterwards.
About the speaker
Based in Copenhagen, Dhruv is a mentor at Codementor and Sr. Engineering Manager at Maersk sitting at the intersection of technology, people management, and business. His mental models and easy-to-apply frameworks have helped many grow successfully.
Highlights of the talk
What is an engineering manager?
An engineering manager supports a team of engineers and builds products. In terms of key responsibilities, engineering managers' responsibilities can be divided into people, project, and process.
What does an engineering manager do?
If you're an engineering manager, you will build a team and hire engineers for your team. You will then help the engineers help achieve their personal and professional goals through one-on-ones and more. Even more, an engineering manager has to evaluate individual developers if they are not fulfilling the organizations' expectations. In such cases, the engineering manager should try to identify the problem, work with the engineer to grow, and if the engineer continues to fail to meet expectations, engineering managers are expecting to run the process of letting someone go as well.
For project management, we can divide them into now, soon, and later. To keep track of the now, engineering managers need to conduct daily stand ups and remove any blocker for her team. The company is also dependent on engineering managers to be the liaison between the development team and other company stakeholders. As for the soon, engineering managers work closely with product managers to do two things: (1) remove blockers and (2) make documents readable and understandable by engineers. For "later," we're talking a quarter, half a year, even a year.
To manage people and projects effectively, you need processes. For instance, you want to understand and measure the cadence, like story points and velocity. As an example, if you see that QA is the bottleneck, you can start asking the QA to write a test plan for engineers to test instead of having one single QA test for all projects, which increases the team's velocity. You measure, modify, add, and drop processes to streamline software development to make it more efficient.
Is being an engineering manager for you?
Regardless of whether you choose the individual contributor or engineering manager route, as you become more senior, ambiguity and ownership increase, while structure decreases. People should be able to come to you and rely on you on complex projects. Now, let's talk about the specific traits for an engineering manager.
Engineering managers have to be great communicators as they have to talk to developers, product managers, and many other stakeholders. So you really have to have strong communication skills. Additionally, leadership is also about empathy. If you cannot relate to people, you cannot inspire them. A manager has to be empathetic so they can relate to people to inspire and empower people to do greater things.
Often engineering managers are found to run from one meeting to another, where the context changes dramatically. In one, they could be talking to developers about engineering problems, and in another room they're talking to the CTO about product strategy. So they have to be very agile and be able to change and shift gears quickly.
For individual contributors, they must be specialists, great documenters, and they have to foresee how the project is going to scale.
So how do you find your path? Introspection and retrospection. For introspection, you're looking for your direction of happiness. What is something that truly brings us closer to our happiness? Imagine yourself at 50, happy in your life, and write whatever you can imagine. Think beyond what other people think are cool and be authentic to yourself. Once you have a picture of that, imagine what you would be doing at 45 to be able to achieve what you want at 50. The idea is to think far, and then backtrack 5 years to write down what you think you should be doing at different age until you reach your current age.
Once you have an idea of what makes you happy, you have to compare your life to your aspiring life, and ask yourself if you're on the right path and recalibrate. To find the right path for you, it's time to do some retrospection. Take a piece of paper, focus, and recall one activity you fondly remember from your school, hobbies, university, workplace, friendships, and relationships. Are you doing something that sparked joy in different moments of your life? Are you able to identify a pattern in their type, the way you felt, the way you dealt, or the traits you exercised? The common patterns are the hints towards your strengths. The way you do anything, is the way you do everything. You can be good at problem solving, helping people, making friends, or something else.
Identify the patterns in the list you wrote in order to move forward and answer the question, is engineering manager for me?