What You’ll Actually Do As An Engineering Manager

You’re more than just a manager as an engineering manager.

In fact, you have many roles. These include:

Gatekeeper
Family doctor
Advisor
Coordinator
Tech debt manager
Advocate
Your own manager

Some won’t make sense now, but they will. Then, you’ll know what your responsibilities actually are when you transition to the job.

First, there’s your team.

Build and develop the best team

You are the gatekeeper

You have three goals as an engineering manager (EM):

Hire highly qualified people
Support and develop them to be even better
Keep them happy and on the team for as long as possible

The first goal requires you to be involved in the process of hiring them. You won’t be the only decision-maker, but you know what kind of engineers you need better than anyone. Research their background, ask the questions you need answers to, and don’t settle.

Be an active presence in your organization as well. Talk to other managers and pay attention during cross-team meetings. Doing this provides you with the necessary insight into prospects on other teams, which is helpful when they want to transfer.

Then, make sure you support them alongside the rest of your team. This is where goals two and three come in.

You are the family doctor

You’re the reason your engineers become better and stay better.

They may not always make it easy for you, and they need to take some responsibility here as well, but this is the most important part of your job as an EM.

To understand how, consider the difference between a family doctor and a paramedic. Neither is worse than the other, and both fulfill their job duties.

However, the family doctor knows their patients, tracks their long-term health, and makes suggestions to help them live long, happy lives. The paramedic only intervenes when there’s a crisis.

As an EM, you want to be the family doctor. This helps you avoid having to be the paramedic more often than not.

This type of work includes but isn’t limited to tasks such as:

Tracking performance
Providing feedback
And coaching

Again, your engineers may not always like this (they may even hate it sometimes), but it will make them better. This is essential for completing work on time and at the expected quality level (or above). But this is also essential because it demonstrates your interest in their growth and shows them you have their back.

Additionally, it provides you with a better understanding of which engineers are skilled with which types of work. This knowledge allows you to match them with tasks they enjoy or find meaningful. Morale goes up, as does productivity. Plus, people don’t quit because they hate their job.

You’ll know when someone needs support or when you need to let someone go as well, and you’ll be able to make those decisions faster. It’s never enjoyable, but you’ll free up space for new prospects.

Keep projects running smoothly

You are the advisor

Project managers (PMs) focus on the project, while engineering managers focus on the people.

However, as an EM, you are an essential, although indirect, part of the project management team.

Consider how many different projects you’ve worked on as an engineer. Now, consider why your EM recommended you for them. PMs either didn’t know your skillset at all or not as well as your EM.

Additionally, PMs know little to nothing about the technical details. It’s your job to advise them about what went wrong and why, including whether or not your engineer is at fault.

EMs aren’t the only decision-makers here, either. But as one, you’ll need to stay aware of what’s happening with your team. You’ll need to know the gaps in their soft and hard skills, individually and collectively. That way, you can make better recommendations and build and develop your team in the right direction.

You are the coordinator

As an EM, you’re uniquely positioned to coordinate work between teams.

For example, imagine if one team is working on a tight deadline but knows they need to spin up a new app instance. This might require pulling in people who can assist. It might also look like designing a process with the DevOps team to ease the creation of new servers for similar situations (generally a best practice).

In both cases, you’re there to guide the work with the knowledge of your team and others.

Staying aware of other teams and various ongoing projects prepares you for when this is necessary.

Mitigate technical debt

You are the tech debt manager

Engineers seek perfection. Project managers seek completion. Engineering managers seek balance.

Part of that balance is managing the technical debt that comes with any project.

As an engineer, you only see part of the debt. As an EM, you want to see all of it. It’s tempting to let it go or say it’s not your problem, but it has to be.

Remember, PMs are working to get their projects completed on time. Engineers are doing their best to make this happen without sacrificing the code’s quality and long-term maintainability.

But they will have to.

They will cut corners or pick easier solutions. Both create problems down the road.

These might include copy-pasted code irrelevant to today’s work, creating bloat, or unintended bugs. Or, in most cases, in a rush to meet a deadline, someone on your team didn’t properly document their code.

The longer these issues go unaddressed, the more “interest” they collect on the debt until, as you’ve probably experienced yourself, they become unmanageable. Even in the best cases, managing technical debt is like trying to fix a plane in mid-air. If you stay on top of it, at least the plane won’t be on fire, too. If you don’t, you’re rebuilding many things from the ground up. Never a good idea.

You are the advocate

You know how much engineers pay the cost accumulated by technical debt. You know how unenjoyable an engineer’s job can be and how much more it is with the added work. You also know what happens when engineers lose faith in their managers to handle those issues.

As an engineering manager, you can show your engineers you care about issues like technical debt and their well-being.

This starts with listening to them when they tell you about it. Shutting them down or blaming them for problems guarantees they won’t tell you about issues in the future. Instead, they’ll try to take care of it themselves, adding to their stress, your turnover, adding bugs, and affecting timelines.

Instead, treat what they’re saying as important (because it is) and understand why it happened. Then, advocate for dealing with it as one of the project’s priorities. You can also build a clear process for logging and handling technical debt, which is essential since your team will never have the bandwidth to solely focus on it later.

This develops a better work culture, one that supports your engineers, their work, and the project as a whole.

Start with yourself

Master your time

Being a good manager starts with managing yourself. You can’t manage others without doing so.

First, you need to learn how to manage your time.

Yes, being an EM means being there for your team. But they need guidelines for interacting with you. Otherwise, people will come to you with every little problem. Solve this by encouraging your engineers to report issues a certain way, which you can automate with a bot to make it easier for them, for example. Also, block off time in your week to discuss concerns requiring more attention.

There’s a major difference between being involved and always being available. The first shows your engineers you care about where they fit in company processes. The second leads to constant interruptions. This inhibits your ability to create a smooth working experience for the whole team. Everybody loses.

Master your focus

Next, you need to manage where you direct your focus. As a manager, you’re likely to have an endless amount of things to think about, work on, and bring to fruition, probably under pressure as well. Effectively prioritizing helps with this.

One go-to tool is the Eisenhower Matrix, which got its name from the famously productive US president. This instrument encourages users to organize their tasks according to urgency and importance. It’s divided into four quadrants:

Urgent and important: these are time-sensitive tasks requiring immediate attention, such as an engineer dealing with a problem today they’re stuck on
Non-urgent but important: these tasks don’t have an upcoming deadline but are key ingredients to long-term growth and can include checking why the code review on an important pull request is taking a few days instead of hours
Urgent but not important: tasks that need doing but don’t contribute to your team’s broader goals, like someone sending you a direct message asking you to jump on an unnecessary call or make a decision they can make themselves, so delegate these tasks to them or someone else so you can focus on the work only you can do
Non-urgent and not important: log and track these for later, as they may become urgent and important over time, but don’t focus on them until you have to (this is the majority of things coming toward you)

You’re more than just a manager

All of this takes some getting used to, and it’s not easy, but it’s worth doing. Even more, it’s essential work.

Your involvement in everything from hiring to managing technical debt is necessary. You are a pillar and resource for your team, projects, and company. You aren’t the only one, but your contributions matter whether you’re acting as gatekeeper, advisor, tech debt manager, or all at once.

And remember, you can always go back. Try as much as you can, though. It does get easier — it just takes time.

The Short Version

You take on many roles as an engineering manager (EM). These include:

Gatekeeper: be as involved as possible in the engineer hiring process
Family doctor: know your engineers, track their performance, and help them improve
Advisor: recommend engineers to project managers for various work
Coordinator: help other departments when they need it
Tech debt manager: oversee and reduce technical debt
Advocate: make sure technical debt is a project priority
And your own manager: successfully manage yourself first so you can manage others

These are not the only responsibilities an EM has. However, they’re a good representation of how an engineering manager is more than just a manager.

The role is difficult, but it is very rewarding. You’ll make a difference in the lives of your engineers, other departments, and the work overall.