Engineering Manager position explained

Why do we have an engineering manager position?

Our culture emphasizes continuous learning, constructive feedback, and teamwork, and we put maximum effort into shaping our work environment with these values in mind.

To achieve this, we must have leaders on board who are excited about their roles, as well as care about the development of their colleagues. Ideal engineering managers are passionate about what they do and are willing to contribute ideas on improving our engineering culture, work environment, and atmosphere in the team. Engineering Managers guide colleagues throughout their careers and help them understand what they need to do to move forward.

However, we acknowledge that not everyone wants to become a manager. By creating two career paths, we have avoided having someone pushed into the role of manager.

Two career tracks for SW engineers

There are two distinct career paths for engineers - individual contributor and managerial track. This is a fairly common approach in engineering teams across the industry, and it's about personal preferences whether one wants to purely focus on building more complex and better software or building a larger and better engineering team at Sudolabs.

These two tracks differ primarily in their focus on people. The individual contributor track does not typically focus on people leadership. The further along this career path one advances, the more technical leadership and responsibility are expected.

Despite the fact that we still expect technical proficiency from everyone in managerial roles, it is more about guiding people in their careers, hiring, team organization, and creating a favorable working environment.

Both career paths offer substantial growth potential and once senior positions are reached they are equally valuable to the company with comparable scope and impact. We want to make sure that the main reason for engineers to take the managerial path is their real interest in people management.

What is NOT the responsibility of an Engineering Manager?

Before we take a closer look at the specific activities and responsibilities of the engineering manager, we explain very briefly what our structure inside the Engineering Lab looks like. It will provide you with a clear sense of the differences between this job position and project roles.

We distinguish two terms - Job Position and Project Role.

→ Job Position defines skills, seniority, background, and career path

→ Project Role is what you do momentarily on the project and it can change in time and project.

Example: You can be a product owner (project role) on the project and your job title is product manager, but also you can be an SW engineer (job position) and you can take on the role of product owner (project role) somewhere on the other project. Each Project Role has its own responsibilities and activities.

Every project at Sudolabs has these Project Roles defined:

• Product owner - Managing backlog and relations with main stakeholders

• Tech. lead - Responsible for technical direction and state of the product/project

• Account lead - Responsible for long-term and strategic relations with a client as well as contractual and finance areas of the project

• Scrum master - Responsible for setting and leading agile processes on the project

• Software Engineer - Development and releasing of agreed tasks within scrum sprints

• Product designer - Responsible for the product discovery phase in order to shape & validate product scope and also for the whole UX/UI design

Engineering Managers (job title) are NOT REQUIRED to take project roles like tech. lead, scrum master, and product owner. Therefore, we do not automatically expect them to do tasks that product owners or scrum masters usually do. Engineering managers have specific responsibilities, that are not connected with any project role mentioned above.

However, they CAN take any or multiple project roles, if they like to do so, but it's not a requirement or a part of the engineering manager's responsibility. It's OK to have only one project role as a software engineer and not represent any other of the project roles mentioned above.

A detailed description of engineering manager activities

In describing the day-to-day duties of the engineering manager, we tried to be as specific as possible. In this way, we hope everybody will get a good sense of what awaits them in this role.

Leadership

• Manage expectations across peers, and company leadership and promote calm

• Be able to read the morale of your direct reports and respond to their needs

• Work to actively improve morale in the teams

• Manage narratives, channel negativity into inspiration and motivation, and protect the entire team

• Detect and respond to the needs of your reports.

• Ensure your reports have a good work-life balance and are taking enough holiday

• Live the company values, guard a positive culture, and define policies that support relatedness between teams and team members

• Fosters a culture of delivering praise and constructive feedback across the organization and actively demonstrates these behaviors

• Works across the organization to foster a culture of seeking out feedback and using it as a tool for growth and actively demonstrates these behaviors

Career development

• Consult and help to build a career development plan for every individual in your team

• Be responsible for promotions of your direct reports with support from the CTO and other engineering managers

• Have regular 1:1 meetings with your teammates (to review & update career plan, provide & collect feedback, openly discuss work-related topics, and help them do their best work)

• Get involved in long-standing performance issues with targeted behavior change or performance plans

Hiring & onboarding

• Actively participate in the interview process

• Take part in the final candidate hiring decision process

• Actively promote & recommend our job opportunities externally (to reach more candidates)

• Be responsible for the onboarding process of new team members

Engineering culture & org. design

• Identify opportunities to improve existing organizational processes and make changes that positively affect the team

• Be an active member of the engineering management working group and lead some of the initiatives for improving engineering culture and work environment

• Actively research new trends and techniques in the engineering world to keep our team ahead of the curve

Technical mentorship

• Support team members in learning & education

• Provide and recommend suitable learning sources & training

• Ensure that learning budget is used and consult on its usage

• Plan & schedule project work to create opportunities for learning

• Promote learning as a necessary activity within the team

• Invest time into individual detailed technical assistance and teaching

Knowledge sharing

• Motivate team members to actively contribute to internal knowledge bases

• Motivate team members to publish & present to the external community (blog posts, events, conferences, etc.)

• Actively identify opportunities to promote & share team knowledge outside the team

• Ensure team members have time & space for knowledge-sharing activities

Effective communication

• Ensure the team's overall alignment and smooth operations

• Support clear communication of company initiatives/visions / goals/changes

• Resolve team conflicts & misunderstandings

• Actively identify & seek potential blockers and help to unblock your teammates

• Resolves interpersonal and technical conflict within and outside the team

• Motivate team and individuals

• Organize teambuilding activities to support good team relationships

• Communicate the current status of individual team members and the overall team situation to the department lead (CTO)

The article is part of a series that takes a look behind the scenes at Sudolabs. Our goal is to give you a better understanding of our structure, how we work, but also how we approach things. We will be coming up with various topics about how Sudolabs work gradually, so follow us.

You might want to check out our career pages since we currently have an opening for an Engineering Manager.