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Engineering Manager

The Engineering Manager is accountable for building high performing teams.

Accountabilities

  • If the team has low CvD[1] (under 90%) it’s on the EM
  • If the team has low commitment (below 70% of capacity) it’s on the EM
  • If the team isn’t continuously improving their process to deliver more effectively & reduce bottlenecks, it’s on the EM
  • If the team is not communicating well or working well together it’s on the EM.
  • If the engineers who report to them don’t have the right skillset to tackle their problems it’s on the EM
  • If the engineers who report to them aren’t focussed on their work it’s on the EM
  • If engineers that report to them have performance problems that impact teams being able to deliver, it’s on the EM
  • If engineers that report to them don’t have personal goals & career development plans, it’s on the EM

Responsibilities

Planning

  • Work with PM/PO/Designers and Architects to define key results for teams
  • Work with PM/PO, Designers, Architects and team to decompose a feature
  • Lead necessary tradeoff decisions with the PM, PO, Designer, and team

Process

  • Evolve Agile approach to fit team and project needs.
  • Foster continuous improvement mindset amongst team
  • Challenge team to identify bottlenecks & ways of speeding up delivery
  • Helping in breakdown of a problem into an executable action plan for themselves and other engineers
  • Generate support for a company/team decision
  • Work across engineering teams (dev, QA, devops) to ensure new code launches smoothly and customer needs are met

Meetings

  • Guide effectiveness of team meetings. Ensure agendas/purpose are clear & actions captured.

Sprint coordination

  • Manage technical WIP & help with/raise blockers
  • Ensure engineers have clear focus
  • Ensure engineers pause to ask questions as necessary
  • Guide team in balance of addressing tech debt vs new features

Management

  • Ensure engineers understand how the work they are doing ladders up to wider company goals
  • Ensure engineers have the skills needed to support their team
  • Ensure engineers are focussed on the sprint & stories at hand
  • Deal with team interpersonal issues
  • Deal with performance issues
  • Solving, not creating problems
  • The ability to work with leadership during an emergency situation to identify and communicate impact and progress
  • Create compensation change recommendations and share with directors
  • Coach engineers career paths and personal growth in a way that lines up with their education plans
    • Coach engineers to set personal goals & assist in defining steps to achieve them
    • Coach engineers to set goals that push them out of their comfort zone and promote growth
    • Be a sponsor for engineers so they have access to growth opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have on their own
  • Make sure leadership is aware of growth & learning opportunities engineers are looking for so they can enable that if possible
  • Coordinate with leadership to reinforce coaching that is happening for technical development & good engineering practices
  • Set and maintain high individual and team expectations

Monitor & work to improve team health & morale

  • Actively work to help the team form & bond

Practical Examples

  • EM is present on every daily standup meeting making sure that daily operation of the team is proceeding smoothly
  • EM is facilitating discussion on feature refinement meetings and helping POs and team to shape the major fragments of work
  • EM is helping on sprint refinement meetings by facilitating discussion about tasks (stories and bugs)

[1] CvD = committed versus delivered: metric showing the amount of stories team promised and delivered (according to definition of done)