Expectations of Engineering Managers

Make sum of parts greater than the whole.

parts > whole

Andy Grove famously said in his book, High Output Management — “The output of a manager is the sum of the output of the team(s) under her influence”. Being successful as managers is about choosing to perform tasks that have high leverage to increase your teams’ output. Building teams, mentoring, setting/articulating a clear vision and setting the right culture are some of the most high leverage activities that a manager can do. However, majority Engineering Manager candidates think of their responsibilities as having to manage tasks, do code reviews, think architecture and maybe conduct interviews. While these activities give you some leverage, it is a small fraction of everything you can do to be the most productive Engineering Manager.

Another thing that Andy Grove says — “lead teams by setting clear expectations and cultural values” or something to that effect. When complexity and ambiguity is high, team performance is influenced by cultural values. When complexity and ambiguity is low, team performance is influenced by expectations. While the majority of the post is about setting expectations for the latter, I talk about exemplifying cultural values at the end.

Just like the Engineering Competencies, my goal is to help visualize engineering managers’ roles, success and growth; and help align with the needs of the organization. For leaders, this hopefully provides a starting point to articulate expectations of your engineering managers. Some of these may not apply at your stage of the organization and that is by design. These competencies are not meant to be permanent, rather to be evolved as your organization grows.

With that said, let’s go!

Manager Competencies

The points under each competency are provided to help with contextualizing the competency, not meant to be used as a checklist.

Deliver Results

• Your speed is your advantage. Execute sustainably fast.
• You are a master organizer, planner and executor. You proactively identify and clear roadblocks.
• You instill strong and healthy work ethics, lead your teams to produce high quality work on time without havoc.
• You set a high bar for yourself, your team and peers; and strive for excellence.
• You obsess about customers, and make data-informed decisions.
• You are deeply technical, are able to make trade-offs and pick the right tool for the job.
• Your output matters, input not so much. Do whatever it takes to GSD.

Leadership

• You act with humility.
• Trust is paramount to a healthy organization. You continuously build trust with team members and the broader organization.
• You empower your team to take action, unafraid to take smart risks and challenge the status quo.
• You think of yourself as a beginner, always striving to learn. You have an open mind and seek the best answers.
• You lead by setting the right example, letting your actions speak louder than your words.

Build motivated and high performance teams

• You hire top talent and develop internal talent to have a strong bench of leaders.
• You create high performing teams and a culture that thrives on regular feedback.
• You ensure strong performance evaluation, mentoring and coaching for every individual on your teams.
• You create a culture of collaboration, where people not only love working together within the teams, but with the broader organization.
• You create a culture that values diversity of opinions and ideas, people feel safe to express their opinions and the best ideas always win.
• You foster a kind culture, and do not tolerate brilliant jerks.

Strong Communicator

• You are an exceptionally strong communicator, both verbal and written. Concise, crisp, honest and respectful.
• You are an exceptional listener.
• You are not a messenger. You can and should disagree, but commit and own the message communicated to your teams and the broader organization.
• You set clear expectations, solicit, synthesize and deliver feedback.
• You communicate business objectives and product portfolio to your teams.

Strong vision

• Understand the direction of the company and translate them into powerful team missions.
• Clearly articulate the vision, and rally the team to execute towards the company vision.
• Have a clear organizational vision as the company scales with the goal of less churn and havoc while maintaining and improving executional efficiency.
• Start to construct a strategic and cohesive vision for your teams and set the team up towards executing on your vision.

Guiding principle

Everything I said so far is fine and dandy. At the end of the day, this should be any leader’s overarching guiding principle → Company first, Team second, and You last. When leaders are perceived as not being company first, trust cannot be built. World class organizations cannot be built without trust.