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👨‍🏫 Thinking like an Engineering Manager

The role of an Engineering Manager (EM) varies across industries, but it generally involves people-management responsibilities for software engineers.

For the sake of this post, we’ll just stick with Engineering Manager (or the short-hand version, EM)

In this post, we’re going to do an exercise of empathy geared towards Engineering Managers.

Practical Empathy

Before we dive in…a word on empathy.

Empathy a word my wife and I have been teaching our kids (okay…not all 3 of our kids, the 1 year old might be a bit too young for the concept!)

We’ve boiled it down for them by explaining it like this: empathy is being aware of how someone else feels, thinks, or behaves.

In reality, teaching this to my kids is a hit-or-miss experience. But its magical when we see them actually slowing down to consider how another person feels.

As we have empathy for EM’s, that too is a magical experience because the quality of collaboration and relationship sky rockets.

What do EM’s care about?

Okay back to Engineering Managers (EM’s)…

Let’s try to make a simple list of what EM’s care about:

• People: Unlike TPMs, EMs manage people. They monitor morale, create growth opportunities, co-manage career trajectories of their team members, hire and recruit, and protect their team from organizational drama.

• Team Tooling and Processes: EMs decide and/or influence tools and processes for efficient teamwork. They often determine how to use Jira, set work tracking standards, and visualize team progress.

• Domain: EMs focus on a specific domain, like billing systems, ensuring reliability and performance. They act as thought leaders, guiding technical strategy in their area.

• Tech Debt: EMs manage tech debt to keep systems healthy. Less tech debt means more capacity for strategic projects.

• Capacity Planning: EMs plan team capacity, balancing people, strategy, system health, tech debt, and external demands to ensure efficient operations.

As you approach an EM for needed collaboration, its important to keep all these areas of concern in mind.

Build Relationships through Curiosity

You can lean into empathy with an EM by asking simple questions to build the relationship:

• How do you feel about your team size and composition relative to demands?

• Tell me more about your team’s domain and its role in the company.

• What’s your team’s strategy moving forward?

• What tech debt is your team addressing?

• How has your team and domain evolved over time?

• If you had a magic wand, what would you change about your team or domain?

• What is the biggest challenge your team is facing right now?

Asking these simple questions is a way to build a relationship. It shows you have interest in their work beyond your own self-interest of the program.

Your goal with these questions is to see the world from their vantage point. Be curious.

Collaborating with Engineering Managers

Building a relationship is great, but it doesn’t stop there.

Collaboration should reflect more than just a healthy relationship. It should reflect greater value-add than either of you can give individually.

Layer 1 Collaboration

Layer 1 collaboration are the fundamental and required points of collaboration that should be obvious.

These are the basics:

• Program Needs: Identify program dependencies and what their team needs to contribute.

• Deliver Context: Share the big picture and provide onboarding assets to save EMs from creating new materials or relying on face-to-face explanations.

• On-Going Execution: Regularly connect on status, solving problems and removing roadblocks together.

You cannot avoid these points of collaboration. They are necessary and useful. If you do avoid them, then program execution will immediately suffer.

However, be aware that they are self-serving for you, the TPM. There is a way you can build a much richer collaborative model with an EM.

Layer 2 Collaboration

Layer 2 Collaboration is the less obvious but powerful ways to collaborate with an EM.

• Cleaning up Tech Debt: Understand the team's tech debt. With the EM, explore ways to address it alongside your program roadmap (in a way that doesn’t compromise timelines or objectives, if possible). This helps with capacity planning and benefits both the program and the team.

• Identify Growth Opportunities: An EM wants to grow the talent of their team. Work with the EM to match tasks with the right skill level. Decide if the work is suitable for a junior, senior, or almost-staff engineer based on its impact.

• Protect The Team: Help the EM shield their team from distractions. Take on reporting responsibilities to allow engineers more time for focused work and delivery. For example, you take on reporting responsibilities of that program

• Enable Autonomy: Track the program across teams with a lightweight integration method. Agree with the EM(s) on a top-level artifact (e.g., Jira Epic) for program tracking, while allowing the team to manage their work autonomously under it.

• Documentation Improvement: Collaborate on enhancing documentation for both current and future projects. Well-documented processes and codebases reduce onboarding time and improve efficiency.

• Recognition System: Implement a recognition system where the EM can highlight team members contributions to the program, which is then made visible to a much more senior/leadership audience.

Summary

Practical empathy is a useful tool to build relationships and add a ton of value in collaborative experiences. It looks like:

• Knowing what they care about

• Showing interest with curiosity

• Looking for win-win collaboration points

Healthy relationships with Engineering Managers is a must if you want to be a high-impact TPM. They are extremely valuable and indispensable partners.

People

🤝 Nicola Ballotta, an engineering leader you should know.

I have grown to really appreciate Nicola’s views on engineering teams and culture. Check out his post below about conflict on engineering teams.

To introduce him, I’ll just refer you to his own intro on LinkedIn:

Resources

📚 Educative.io - level up your learning.

I’ve personally used Educative for a couple things.

• I took this course: Grokking System Design

• I wrote this course: Technical Program Management, A Practitioner’s Guide

It’s a powerful platform if you want to up-level your technical skills. They’ve also started investing in AI features (shocking, I know) such as AI Mock Interviews.