Metadata
- Author: Gergely Orosz
- Full Title:: Engineering Leadership Skill Set Overlaps
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: ✍️ Déjame sin trabajo, por favor, Product Management
- URL:: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-leadership-skillset-overlaps?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fengineering%2520manager&utm_medium=reader2
- Finished date:: 2023-05-08
Highlights
This is literally the same than in 📖 The Making of a Manager: purpose, people, process.
Strategy & Alignment, People, Building: a Mental Model (View Highlight)
Senior engineer
Strategy: little time. Senior engineers tend to contribute to the roadmap for the team, especially on the technical side. However, they rarely spend time on shaping the engineering strategy (View Highlight)
Alignment: little time. They are expected to manage stakeholders of projects they are responsible for. These stakeholders are usually other engineers, but they can include business stakeholders, as well. Stakeholder management takes up a smaller fraction of their time though, and they’re not expected to be experts at it. (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2023-05-09
(New highlights added 2023-05-10
A position where the person assuming it is not expected to code day-to-day, but in return manages a larger team of up to around 12 engineers. (View Highlight)
Engineering managers will spend much of their time on helping the team operate well and people to grow. This will encompass team building and operating activities like 1:1s and roadmapping. It will also encompass hiring, promotions, coaching / mentoring / giving feedback and performance management. (View Highlight)
Strategy: some amount of time. Engineering managers drive the technical strategy of their team, and are often involved in the organizational-level discussions and decision making. (View Highlight)
Even with a strong product counterpart and a good product-engineering relationship, engineering managers typically need to spend time aligning with other teams to unblock their engineers (View Highlight)
Senior Technical Project Manager Yixin Zhu (View Highlight)
“To simplify where a TPM comes in, let’s split up who is responsible for each question:
Why are we building and what are we building? – the PM How will we build it? – the EM
When will we build it and who will build it? – the TPM” (View Highlight)
Visualizing how each role might spend their time. Note the role that falls closest to the “Beware” pattern. (View Highlight)
I’ve consistently observed that people in roles which force them to mix many different types of activities among these dimensions, tend to struggle more and are more likely to both perform below what is expected of them, and to burn out. (View Highlight)
To be efficient at building software, you need to be on the maker’s schedule. However, when managing people or aligning teams, you are forced to be on the manager’s schedule, attending meetings or being disrupted at any time of day. (View Highlight)