The Secret To Engineering Management Is Doing “Nothing”

Your measure of success changes dramatically when you transition from an engineer to an engineering manager.

Unfortunately, many fail to realize this. As a result, their performance suffers, and they’re caught off-guard when they find out why.

But avoiding this is as simple as learning to do nothing.

Learn to do nothing

A new engineering manager (EM) came to me once because he was upset. When he was a senior engineer, he knew his deliverables and timelines. It was a lot of work, but everything made sense.

As an EM, his time tracker showed he was constantly:

Jumping into meetings
Reviewing other people’s code
And analyzing other people’s tasks

At the end of the week, he had nothing concrete to show for his efforts.

In other words, he felt like he was doing a whole lot of nothing, and it made him anxious. He worried the lack of visible deliverables meant he was a bad manager. The thought caused him so much stress he even thought about switching back to being an engineer.

But doing “nothing” is the secret to being an engineering manager. This is a joke, but, like many jokes, it hides an important truth in plain sight.

Your success in your new job doesn’t depend on what you do by yourself – it depends on what you and your team achieve together. The “nothing” you’re doing – guiding your team, leading meetings, and making sure that what people do today aligns with the company’s long-term technical vision – makes your team successful, which makes you successful.

This is a huge adjustment, and it’s natural to feel lost at first, even when you know the truth. But thankfully, you can break it down into a few key components.

Know your expectations

The first step to having a successful team is understanding your company’s goals. This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to get it wrong.

I once hired a project manager who was great at what he did. But he didn’t want to listen when we communicated expectations – he had his own vision for what he should be doing. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until we let him go that he realized he was doing something wrong.

“If I understood it differently,” he said, “I would have done something different.”

This problem is easily solved: understand and follow expectations.

There’s always a hierarchy. If you’re an EM, you probably report to the VP of engineering or, depending on the size of your company, directly to the CTO or CEO.

Organize a meeting and tell them you want to understand what they want to expect from your team and, as a result, from you.

Your focus depends entirely on these goals, and you’ll plan differently depending on whether their priority is:

Scaling the team
Weeding out inefficiencies
Or correcting a tendency to miss deadlines

In all cases, when there’s something the team needs to do or fix, you are considered responsible for making sure it happens.

Assess where your team falls short

No matter the strategy, three components comprise your team’s success:

Task completion
Time management
And communication (which also includes team vibe)

Improvement in each area means first understanding what success means and then assessing whether it’s been achieved.

Note: You may notice many of these tasks are more often associated with project managers (PMs), and rightfully so. But even as an EM, you need to pay attention to these. A PM makes sure tasks are completed on time, but they can’t do anything if engineers aren’t meeting deadlines or if task quality is poor.

They come to you with issues like this. Your success is based on resolving these issues and improving everyone else’s success in this regard.

Task completion

There are typically three stages before a task is considered complete:

Implementation: engineers write the initial code to solve a particular task or work on a feature
Code review: the engineer’s peers review their code for stylistic consistency with company practices and workability, sending the code back to them if it doesn’t meet these criteria
Quality assurance (QA): a specially-trained team tests the feature as a whole to see if it works and if integrating it into the product breaks anything else

Your role as the EM here is like a head chef in a kitchen. You don’t sign off on individual dishes, but you do set up the process and intervene when something goes wrong.

Time management

Time management is typically easier to assess than technical work. You need to see if your team members:

Make accurate estimates for task completion
Regularly meet deadlines
Find time for necessary meetings, one-on-ones, and other check-ins
Clock excessive overtime hours

Many engineers struggle with these responsibilities, which is why many need EMs to keep them on track.

Sometimes, engineers think they can get by just by being a technical genius alone. But they won’t be contributing to team success if they consistently:

Make poor timeline estimates
Fail to adjust initial estimates as they get deeper into the work
Or if they waste time perfecting non-essential details

You can easily build processes to regularly get this information.

The most important task is to log progress using your company’s preferred project management platform. Make it a habit to log delays and review why they happened later. Analyze recent sprints to see how many deadlines were shifted or missed.

Just as important as logging timeline issues is understanding their causes. For example, it’s important to distinguish between unforeseen issues and when individual contributors (ICs) are struggling with perfectionism.

Communication

Good communication comes down to several key components:

Content: Are team members communicating new and relevant information that helps put people on the same page?
Regularity: Is necessary communication happening as often as it needs to?
Quality: Are people sharing relevant, necessary information when they need to?
Mutual understanding: How often do team members misunderstand each other?
Collective processes for group work: Do people take notes at meetings or prepare relevant agendas?
Respect: Is there a toxic, conflict-prone culture on the team?

You can easily miss these issues because they often form part of the “background noise.” But when they surface, they can disrupt projects, make everyone miserable, and lead to high turnover. This results in spending unnecessary time and effort to bring on and train new hires.

Communication may seem hard to assess, but that’s not true.

As with time management, logging issues as they come up is your best strategy. When you hear complaints that Lex didn’t tell Emma about an important deadline, log it. While you’re at it, track when meetings run too long or when no one prepares an agenda.

Get your teammates into the habit of doing the same.

You can also assess meeting quality using an automated meeting rating tool. You can create one using Zapier, Google Calendar, and Google Forms. After each meeting, all participants can assess:

How on point the conversation was
Whether it went too long
If the agenda was relevant
And so on

Team vibe

There’s another part of assessing communication that is more indirect. Think of it like staying attentive to workplace atmosphere.

Here are some examples:

Is there a designer who uses so much jargon that no one understands what they want?
Are there prickly, lone-wolf engineers no one wants to work with?
If two team members don’t like each other, do they spread the drama to the rest of the team?

Being sensitive to these kinds of dynamics is imperative. You can’t precisely measure this kind of information, which can be frustrating. But even if it isn’t exact, it will help direct your attention to problematic areas.

If there isn’t a crisis, it might not be immediately obvious when there’s an issue with communication. So, make it a habit to bring this up in one-on-ones.

Don’t make it about blame:

Ask questions about the general vibe
Ask if people talk to each other
And ask if it’s difficult to connect with anyone

Build relationships and facilitate growth

First, you need to build trust with your team. I cannot say enough that this is your currency as an engineering manager.

If your team members don’t trust you, they’ll hide issues from you, and you won’t know about problems until it’s too late. You need to communicate with words – but more importantly, your actions and presence – that you’re on the same team and have each their backs.

This means showing interest in your team members’ well-being and learning to understand what motivates them. When problems arise, focus on the issue rather than the people involved.

Basically, treat people like people. If you see them as a means to an end, they’ll know and close themselves off.

The real magic happens after you’ve built that foundation of trust and relationship. Then, they’ll be open to you coaching them.

On that note, my girlfriend recently went to a coaching workshop. Her trainers told her that the difference between dictating and coaching is that a dictator tells you what to do and punishes you if you disobey. A coach is someone who asks you the right questions. They help you reach conclusions and decisions for yourself, effectively nudging you in creative and productive directions.

How to point things out and facilitate growth well is a topic worth delving into all on its own. But here are a few quick tips:

Hear team members out and involve them in their own development
Point out areas in which people can grow their skills and provide incentives like free trainings for them to do so
Assign people new responsibilities – this helps them stretch their wings and shows you trust them
Provide positive and actionable feedback as they learn new skills to build confidence

Remember that, as an engineering manager, your focus is on building relationships that last over time.

The short version: their success is your success

Your success as an engineering manager is measured by how successful your team is as a whole. This can be a source of anxiety if you’re new, though, especially when you’re used to more concrete measures.

But you can lower your stress and improve performance by focusing on a few key components:

Knowing your direct supervisors’ expectations
Assessing your team member’s ability to complete tasks, manage their time, communicate effectively, and the overall vibe
Building trust and mastering the art of coaching

Also, you don’t have to do it alone. Lean on your team, fellow managers, and superiors for help when needed. Everyone’s in this together, and while their success is yours, your success is also theirs.