Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the purpose and goals of engineering managers. We learned about the broad responsibilities of engineering managers and the activities we perform in support of those responsibilities. Here’s a recap of these:

• Maintaining teams capable of serving business needs
• Producing mechanisms to make engineering teams self-sustaining and scalable
• Owning the reputation and impact of their team
• Performing activities and tasks related to engineering, managing, transitioning, and big-picture thinking

We learned how engineering managers spend their days and presented steps for you to plan your own days, summarized here:

• Get a baseline of how to plan your day by surveying the expectations of your manager, peers, and engineering team.
• Focus expectation surveys on understanding what others expect from you and not on making early commitments you may struggle to uphold.
• Gain insight into the relative importance of work you might engage in by comparing the four activities of engineering managers with the notes from your expectation surveys.
• Observe what your engineering team needs and what members do and don’t have time for to further determine how you can best contribute to the team’s success.
• Avoid taking on hard technical challenges personally since they can absorb too much of your time and deprive your team of learning opportunities.
• Be a translator. Your unique understanding of engineering and the business setting puts you in a position to provide invaluable context for your engineers and your leadership team.

Lastly, we learned how taking responsibility for the work of others can be a stressful adjustment. Your goal is to find a balance between providing guidance and alignment without dictating or controlling. Progress as an engineering manager will feel much slower than progress as an engineer. Engineering managers must persevere without much feedback at times.

In the next chapter, Chapter 2, we will learn how to approach our responsibilities and activities with a style that fits the setting. We will introduce some of the most common leadership styles and how they apply to different engineering team situations.