The Hunt for The Perfect Engineering Manager

Your engineering mangers can either be the heroes of your organisation or just plain administrators. What do you have? Are you hunting for the perfect engineering managers or do you believe they don’t exist?

In my last post, I introduced a practical approach to engineering leadership and the skills required in any engineering organisation. However, I’m sure people have many new questions on the practical side of how this works in practice and especially when it comes to the engineering manager role.

The key insight I tried to convey was that all engineering organisations are built around four distinctly different skill sets and that you need engineers who jointly cover all the skills, no matter how you distribute the responsibilities: code development skills ( the developer), task priority and tradeoff handling ( the backlog owner), technical architect skills managing long-term vs short-term ( the architect), as well as people and team skills to keep people happy, make them work on the right things, and make sure things get delivered (the manager).

The larger the organisation, the more roles tend to be specialised. As a result, the coordination cost goes up. You typically then get elaborate frameworks and formal development processes to ensure coordination, and most organisations introduce roles dedicated for…