Engineering manager core skills · Interview knowledge

From "Good engineering management" is a fad

I think there are eight foundational engineering management skills, which I want to personally group into two clusters: core skills that are essential to operate in all roles (including entry-level management roles), and growth skills whose presence–or absence–determines how far you can go in your career.

The core skills are:
- Execution: lead team to deliver expected tangible and intangible work. Fundamentally, management is about getting things done, and you’ll neither get an opportunity to begin managing, nor stay long as a manager, if your teams don’t execute.
  Examples: ship projects, manage on-call rotation, sprint planning, manage incidents
- Team: shape the team and the environment such that they succeed. This is not working for the team, nor is it working for your leadership, it is finding the balance between the two that works for both.
  Examples: hiring, coaching, performance management, advocate with your management
- Ownership: navigate reality to make consistent progress, even when reality is difficult Finding a way to get things done, rather than finding a way that it’s not getting done is someone else’s fault.
  Examples: doing hard things, showing up when it’s uncomfortable, being accountable despite systemic issues
- Alignment: build shared understanding across leadership, stakeholders, your team, and the problem space. Finding a realistic plan that meets the moment, without surprising or being surprised by those around you.
  Examples: document and share top problems, and updates during crises
The growth skills are:
- Taste: exercise discerning judgment about what “good” looks like—technically, in business terms, and in process/strategy. Taste is a broad church, and my experience is that broad taste is a somewhat universal criterion for truly senior roles. In some ways, taste is a prerequisite to Amazon’s Are Right, A Lot.
  Examples: refine proposed product concept, avoid high-risk rewrite, find usability issues in team’s work
- Clarity: your team, stakeholders, and leadership know what you’re doing and why, and agree that it makes sense. In particular, they understand how you are overcoming your biggest problems. So clarity is not, “Struggling with scalability issues” but instead “Sharding the user logins database in a new cluster to reduce load.”
  Examples: identify levers to progress, create plan to exit a crisis, show progress on implementing that plan
- Navigating ambiguity: work from complex problem to opinionated, viable approach. If you’re given an extremely messy, open-ended problem, can you still find a way to make progress? (I’ve written previously about this topic.)
  Examples: launching a new business line, improving developer experience, going from 1 to N cloud regions
- Working across timescales: ensure your areas of responsibility make progress across both the short and long term. There are many ways to appear successful by cutting corners today, that end in disaster tomorrow. Success requires understanding, and being accountable for, how different timescales interact.
  Examples: have an explicit destination, ensure short-term work steers towards it, be long-term rigid and short-term flexible
Self-assessing on these skills
There’s no perfect way to measure anything complex, but here are some thinking questions for you to spend time with as you assess where you stand on each of these skills:
- Execution
  - When did your team last have friction delivering work? Is that a recurring issue?
  - What’s something hard you shipped that went really, really well?
  - When were you last pulled onto solving a time-sensitive, executive-visible project?
- Team
  - Who was the last strong performer you hired?
  - Have you retained your strongest performers?
  - What strong performers want to join your team?
  - Which peers consider your team highly effective?
  - When did an executive describe your team as exceptional?
- Ownership
  - When did you or your team overcome the odds to deliver something important? (Would your stakeholders agree?)
  - What’s the last difficult problem you solved that stayed solved (rather than reoccurring)?
  - When did you last solve the problem first before addressing cross-team gaps?
- Alignment
  - When was the last time you were surprised by a stakeholder? What could you do to prevent that recurring?
  - How does a new stakeholder understand your prioritization tradeoffs (incl rationale)?
  - When did you last disappoint a stakeholder without damaging your relationship?
  - What stakeholders would join your company because they trust you?
- Taste
  - What’s a recent decision that is meaningfully better because you were present?
  - If your product counterpart left, what decisions would you struggle to make?
  - Where’s a subtle clarification that significantly changed a design or launch?
  - How have you inflected team’s outcomes by seeing around corners?
- Clarity
  - What’s a difficult trade-off you recently helped your team make?
  - How could you enable them to make that same trade-off without your direct participation?
  - What’s a recent decision you made that was undone? How?
- Navigating ambiguity
  - What problem have you worked on that was stuck before assisted, and unstuck afterwards?
  - How did you unstick it?
  - Do senior leaders bring ambiguous problems to you? Why?
- Working across timescales
  - What’s a recent trade off you made between short and long-term priorities?
  - How do you inform these tradeoffs across timescales?
  - What long-term goals are you protecting at significant short-term cost?
While those groupings of “core” and “growth” skills are obvious groupings to me, what I came to appreciate while writing this is that some skills swap between core to growth as the fads evolve. Where execution is a foundational skill today, it was less of a core skill in the hypergrowth era, and even less in the investor era.
This is the fundamentally tricky part of succeeding as an engineering manager across fads: you need a sufficiently broad base across each of these skills to be successful, otherwise you’re very likely to be viewed as a weak manager when the eras unpredictably end.

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