What is expected of a Engineering Manager? - Rodrigo Flores

This resource first appeared in issue #47 on 23 Oct 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other

What is expected of a Engineering Manager? - Rodrigo Flores

Flores, a manager of managers, has a nice article on what he expects of his managers. In priority order:

• Support the members of your team and help them grow.
• Follow along the deliveries, setting quality standards, making sure the team has the support they need and upper management the feedback they need.
• Keep a constant practice of creating, improving or eliminating team or company processes.

Note the order.

A recurring bit of advice from people who have been good managers is to focus on managerial activities that scale, that have high leverage. Yes, delivering what you said you’d deliver is important. If you roll up your sleeves and spend 20 hours doing that piece of the project that only you know how to do to get the next release finished in time, that’s good and all but there’s no leverage there.

If instead you spend say 40 hours working with one of your team members to get it done with them and teach them how to do it, well, you’re a little late on this deliverable, but your team is now stronger because someone else now knows how to do The Thing - every future deliverable will be a bit easier.