Congratulations! You’ve just been promoted to an engineering manager.
Now what?
Even after months of demonstrating hard work and technical expertise, taking ownership over an entire team can feel overwhelming. New engineering managers quickly find they aren’t able to live knee-deep in code every day like they once were. Instead, they’re charged with helping their team solve larger problems, setting deadlines, advising on career growth and a myriad of other duties they didn’t have as independent contributors.
It’s not always an easy adjustment.
“I soon realized that as a manager, I was now responsible for the work and growth of my team, not just my own,” said Malvika Mathur, an engineering manager at Quantcast. “I had to invest my time in enabling my team to be successful, which sometimes meant holding myself back from jumping in to flex my old skills.”
So, what can newly minted managers do to ensure a seamless transition into their new role? To find out, Built In San Francisco talked to eight engineers who’ve successfully made the jump to leadership. Here’s what they’ve learned along their career journeys.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
The biggest challenge is getting a grip on project management and making sure that the team gets things done on time. Most projects at Clumio involve many components, like user interface, datapath, back-end development and testing. It is difficult to keep track of everyone’s progress without careful planning.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
As an independent contributor, my job was to execute projects fast. As a manager, it is no longer about me delivering just my part; it’s also about keeping track of everyone’s progress and making sure they are getting help or a nudge when they need it.
What I found to be effective was making a week-to-week timeline for everyone. When people are working on projects that can last for months, it is easy to fall behind the schedule. A weekly checkpoint system helps people make adjustments frequently before they fall too far behind.
What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role?
Communicate with the team and understand what each team member’s expectations are. First-line managers can provide some technical mentoring and oversight, but things usually work best when independent contributors are given as much autonomy as possible. When a team member is falling behind schedule, try to make a weekly plan to subtly help nudge them along.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
The hardest challenge for me was learning to give up some of my prior responsibilities. On one hand, I was excited about the new opportunity. Becoming a manager meant new and interesting challenges that I was eager to dive into. On the other hand, I enjoyed being an individual contributor! I liked my projects and I enjoyed the satisfaction of building a feature or system that worked well and was useful. It was really hard to put down the project work but I knew if I wanted to be a good engineering manager, I would need to spend my time focused on my team.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
Pretty quickly, I realized it was impossible to do both the job of a manager and an individual contributor without burning out. I talked to my director and had what I thought was going to be a difficult conversation, telling him I needed to scale back and delegate my engineering output in order to better support the team. This was scary and felt a little bit like I was admitting defeat, but he was supportive, and told me that he was happy I was committed to the people management side.
This support from my director helped cement my outlook for my role on the team. It’s impossible to do everything, and it’s OK to say “no” as long as you’re prioritizing what’s important. At the time, it was most important to prioritize being a people manager for my team.
What’s the most important piece of advice you'd give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role?
You have only so many hours in the day, and as an engineering manager, there are lots of items that demand your attention. People often tend to look at whether or not something is time-sensitive, rather than whether or not it is important. It’s easy to prioritize the time-sensitive items: email, quick bugs you could fix, questions coming in on Slack.
But sometimes, bigger-picture items that are less time sensitive can get lost in the fray and don’t receive adequate attention. Career conversations, setting a team mission, long-term planning, process reflection — these sorts of things deserve dedicated time.
Think about what your team needs most: Does it need direction? Does it need process improvements? Do people on your team need career coaching? As a manager, make sure you set aside time to tackle these bigger initiatives, as they will be the tools to set your team and yourself up for success.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
Delegation. Given that I had been with the company for over three years and acquired context on a variety of systems and processes — some of which I built, others that I had learned about through osmosis — it was natural for others to come to me and ask me my opinion on these systems. Hiring and training new team members and gradually delegating these various requests to them proved far more time-consuming and challenging than originally anticipated.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
Let’s say it’s a work in progress. But there are a few key components that I had to wrap my head around, which are best summarized as the “what, the who and the how.”
The what: Determining what to delegate to others turned out to be a fairly clear task, given I had context on the work required and had a rough sense of their respective urgency, effort, importance, likely recurrence and error forgiveness. That allowed me to group tasks into ones I could automate entirely, delegate to someone else or continue doing those tasks until delegation became possible.
The who: You really want the right person for the job when you delegate, so it behooves you to get to know your people. Using your own judgment and making a decision while admitting the uncertainty of the situation is key. The guiding principle I used was to delegate reversible, low-risk tasks early.
The how: The actual process of delegation can take on various forms. I was incredibly lucky in this regard, in that I had two experienced engineers joining my team, who immediately understood my need to delegate work to them as the team was growing.
What’s the most important piece of advice you'd give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role?
In one sentence: It’s about them, not you.
What I mean is that you have to shift your focus from what you can produce to what the team can produce. In this process, you may come to a few painful realizations: First, evaluating the output of a team is non-trivial. Second, teams are not static for the simple reason that they grow and shrink as people join or depart them, but even more so because each team member changes.
Making time for your direct reports in one-on-ones and investing in those relationships is important. Only then do you have a realistic shot of adjusting work assignments accordingly to provide people with the opportunities that suit them, while providing maximum long-term productivity for the organization.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
I immediately felt that there were so many things competing for my attention. It’s not always obvious what the most important thing to focus on is from the start. Furthermore, it’s not possible to always jump in and unblock the team, even if the issue at hand is important.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
I put energy toward growing the team members so they can drive forward on projects — even if it means slowing things down in the beginning.
I gave timely and effective feedback and collected feedback from those around me. I noticed what factors were out of my control and focused on the ones that I could make a difference on. I made sure to leave myself time and headspace to think about priorities and what I should be focusing on.
This experience has primed me to think about how to set my team up to grow in unfamiliar areas that align with their interests and the company’s priorities.
What’s the most important piece of advice you'd give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role?
It’s basically a new job, so it’s OK if there are lots of things that you have to struggle through and learn. The lessons you learn along the way are highly valuable and transferable.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
I’ve made the move from individual contributor to manager a few times in my career. The biggest challenge for me has always been letting go of being an expert.
Success as an individual contributor centered around me learning every detail, working hard to master each task and proving my value through hard work. I enjoyed looking at a problem, diving deep into the technical details, doing extensive research and laying out a thoughtful solution. Looking back at the first time I became an engineering manager, I had to learn through trial and error to combine my commitment to technical knowledge with managing individuals.
Stepping into my role at Wing, I set forth with a clear picture of how I wanted to lead in a way that built on my expertise. This meant driving excellence and achievement through a clearly articulated vision, developing a foundation of trust that arises from human connection and instilling a sense of ownership in every individual. Yet when I found myself managing a much larger breadth of technical disciplines, I worried I would not gain the respect of my team, my peers, or leadership.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
It was immediately clear that I couldn’t be the expert when my domain was broad. Instead, I had to rely on others. I spent time getting to know each team member by learning the full depth of their technical responsibilities, their strengths and weaknesses and the opportunities that they saw in the organization. I gained further clarity by asking questions, listening and learning from other leaders.
Over time, I formulated my own conclusions around how to shape the team to be more effective and have a greater impact on Wing’s broader goals. This made me realize that expertise is not as important as building the strong relationships required to align on a strategy for collective success.
What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role?
Learning how to solicit feedback is very important for your own development and for the growth of your organization. Don’t expect evaluations of your performance from your reports, peers or manager to be explicitly expressed or to come from performance reviews. The key is to solicit feedback from all levels of the organization, including your peers.
Seek opinions on whether you’re creating value in the form of collaborative problem-solving. This means broadcasting your goals, checking your assumptions and actively seeking feedback to develop an optimal solution. In seeking feedback, frame discussions on how you can better support the individual or their team, what you could have done differently, and what makes sense for the organization.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
The single biggest challenge for me when I made the switch from an individual contributor to an engineering manager was shifting my focus. I had been a long-term engineer and was very technical before I transitioned into the management role. As a new manager, I was still used to focusing on detailed implementation of projects. Even though I was able to get a lot of things done by myself, my team didn't benefit a lot from my existence.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
I learned that a manager should be the catalyst of the team. He or she will not produce results directly but will help everyone on the team be more productive. Keeping that in mind, I consciously forced myself to focus more on building vision, finding resources and growing team members.
It is important to point out that shifting focus away from implementation details does not mean completely abandoning the technical side. As an engineering manager, it is important to stay on top of new technologies to better build a true vision for the team. It is all about striking the right balance and getting involved at the right level.
What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role, and why?
The most important thing is to decide if you are truly interested in and are suitable for a management role. Many engineers want to become a manager simply because it is considered a step up in their career. However, you can achieve great success as an independent contributor, too. If you like to solve issues by yourself and are excited about technical challenges, maybe it is better to seek career progress as an independent contributor.
On the other hand, if you enjoy planning, organizing, mentoring and solving resource issues for others, you will have a greater chance of being successful in a management role.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
This may sound obvious, but I am now responsible for the direction, impact and growth of my team, rather than just technical execution. That means I am constantly balancing what’s most efficient, like directly tackling a technical problem, with what improves team effectiveness, like delegating, defining ownership areas and helping people grow. This balance needs to be achieved in a way that delivers business impact in the needed timeline.
To summarize the challenge, your job as an engineering manager is to win and increase your team’s capacity to win, where “winning” is delivering the results needed by the business.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
Like most things, becoming a good manager takes thought, guidance and practice. I need to be thoughtful about how my actions or inactions set norms for the team. Being conscious of this helps to create the high-performing team we all want.
In general, being part of a supportive, learning organization gives me confidence that I’m in the right place to take on this growth opportunity.
What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role?
Intentional growth, especially in areas you’re not naturally drawn to, is bound to cause discomfort, but sometimes those are the areas you need to grow to increase your impact. Parts 1 & 2 of “Conscious Career Growth” are two podcasts episodes that you may find helpful as you go through this.
Choose a role where you will get the guidance and support you need to be motivated and successful in an organization whose mission resonates with you. If you can overcome the discomfort, personal growth and big business impact are on the other side.
What was the single biggest challenge you faced during the transition from individual contributor to engineering manager?
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced was learning to let go of my old responsibilities to accommodate my new ones — primarily to reduce (but not stop) writing code. It’s easy to lean into the work that you're comfortable doing, and I often caught myself slipping into writing code and wishing that I could be spending my day solving a problem or learning new tech.
I soon realized that as a manager, I was now responsible for the work and growth of my team, not just my own. I had to invest my time in enabling my team to be successful, which sometimes meant holding myself back from jumping into flexing my old skills. Even after just over a year, I still need to remind myself to be mindful of my time.
How did you overcome this challenge, and how has it shaped your approach to management?
The key thing that helped me navigate this challenge was identifying that I do not have to unlearn things I knew as an engineer, but add that experience to being a manager. I shifted my focus from finding solutions to asking questions around why we need a solution and how it fits into the bigger picture.
I have learned to lean on my team for technical decisions. I spent time understanding the strengths of the individuals on the team and how they work together as a unit, which has led to us having a healthy rapport. That, along with being transparent about priorities and work timelines and working with them to find new solutions has helped build a team dynamic that allows me to get the time I need to fulfill my managerial responsibilities.
What’s the most important piece of advice you’d give to someone who is transitioning into their first engineering manager role, and why?
The main thing I'd like to share with anyone who is starting off on this path is to build trust with your team. It is very important to spend time getting to know the motivations and interests of the people who you will be working with for the majority of your time. Recognizing these qualities at an individual level will help you figure out what each person brings to the table.
Another crucial thing to building trust is to exhibit empathy for the team and to listen to their problems. Your team is also your stakeholder and you have a vested interest in their success — so make time to invest in them!
