The dual track of engineering has grown increasingly popular over the last decade. At many leading organizations, accomplished engineers no longer have to go down the management track in order to advance in their careers. Managers are no longer expected to code in order to build effective technical teams that can deliver.
While giving individuals more optionality about which track to pursue is fantastic, the decision to switch tracks into engineering management is still fraught for many people. Those that make the switch often find the terrain incredibly hard to navigate.
Engineering Manager is a wholly different job than Software Engineer. The experience you've accrued as an individual contributor (IC) won’t leave you adequately prepared for management.
We want to help close that gap. With insights from Engineering Managers who have transitioned in the last few years, we’ll talk through:
Why great Engineering Managers are so hard to come by
A Framework for The Real Scope of Engineering Management
Five skills every Engineering Manager needs
How management skills can also make you a more effective IC
Why Engineering Managers are so hard to come by
In fast-growing organizations, senior engineers get tapped to take on management roles in order to support the influx of new hires that inevitably come with company growth. But what worked for you as a successful IC won’t work for you as an Engineering Manager (EM).
While your technical prowess may help you problem-solve creatively or have solid intuition for the right solutions, you’ll no longer be building software. Instead, you’ll build the teams that build the software. Put another way, the organizing mechanism for IC engineers is technology (how does the code, service, system, or ecosystem function to produce an outcome), while the organizing mechanism for EMs is people (how does the individual, team(s), and company function to produce an outcome).
Managing technical systems and managing people systems are distinct enough that most EMs can’t just “wing it.” In fact, doing so can be very harmful to your direct reports, whose careers you’re now responsible for.
That’s why great EMs are rare. Managing a human system requires fluency across multiple domains: leadership, people management, and technical expertise.
Hillary Bauer is an Engineering Manager at ezCater, where she spent six years as an IC before transitioning into management. She describes how her two best role models embody the intersection nicely.
There are two senior engineering managers I work with closely that I really look up to. One is a top-notch people manager. They’re genuine, empathetic, and deliver feedback excellently. The other is a rockstar technical leader. ICs really respect their technical acumen, and it’s clear that this person can hold their own in technical discussions. They both can pressure test at a high level and lead through complexity. I want to absorb the best parts of both of them!
- Hillary Bauer
About the Authors:
Natalie Rothfels is an Operator in Residence at Reforge and runs a leadership coaching practice. She has held product leadership roles at Quizlet and Khan Academy and was a classroom teacher before that.
Doa Jafri is an early-stage engineering leader and technical consultant. She most recently built and led teams at Glossier and Thrive Global.
A Framework for The Real Scope of Engineering Management
Management has garnered a negative connotation for many Silicon Valley startups because it’s often associated with bureaucracy, slowness, or devalued skills. But great management can actually be a massive differentiator because all roads go to engineering. EMs sit at the intersection of cross-functional stakeholders and technical teams. When the road is clear, things can pass easily. When blocked, everything can come to a standstill. EMs can be the great unblockers.
In practice, this means that EMs must approach their role as part of a greater system. To deliver impactful and reliable output, they need to excel at managing four interconnected inputs that drive it.
1. Managing engineering work
Engineering teams are ultimately responsible for building products. To successfully do this, EMs have to curate the right work for the right people in the right order. This requires them to evaluate new work coming in, understand the health of their current portfolio, assign and delegate effectively to their direct reports, and develop the right level of process that unlocks (not blocks) their team’s work.
2. Managing stakeholders
Nearly every function across the org is dependent somehow on timely updates and output from engineering. Marketing needs to know when products are going out to effectively launch products or campaigns. Finance needs to be able to effectively manage budget based on successful revenue coming in the products. Data needs to be able to effectively track and monitor the health of product lines to inform product strategy. It’s incredibly easy for collaboration to break down, leading to inefficiencies, bottlenecks, friction and, at worse, missing delivery deadlines. EMs needs to be able to navigate the tricky domain of involving a wide range of people with varying degrees of context.
3. Managing people
Helping your direct reports grow requires relationship building, matchmaking skills (right person for the right project for the right reasons), and navigating human emotion and motivation. EMs need to navigate individual performance and team performance by establishing healthy working relationships, avoiding the trap of micromanagement, and getting comfortable with tough conversations and critical feedback that’s in service to growth.
4. Managing themselves
Few ICs really understand the range of demands on an EM’s time. It can be an overwhelming and lonely role, especially if you also have to navigate becoming a manager to your former peers. With ambiguous expectations, it can be easy for EMs to resort to what they’re most comfortable with, whether that’s writing code or playing team cheerleader and just trying to make everyone happy. EMs have to be regularly re-evaluating what activities are actually the highest leverage for them to make their team more impactful.
We also go into this topic in depth in our new Engineering Management program. Click here to learn more.
Five Skills Every Engineering Manager Needs
To effectively manage the inputs to this system, Engineering Managers may need to develop new skills. It’s best to do these things intentionally as one-at-a-time commitments rather than trying to take on a bunch of new behaviors at once.
1. Hone concise, clear, context-driven communication
Prepare for lots of talking
Communication is the name of the game. Much of your day as an EM will be spent talking about, listening to, helping unpack, and thoughtfully distilling information. You’ll need to do this with a wide variety of stakeholders in order to make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Amanda Kalantzis is an Engineering Manager at Reforge with a decade of IC experience under her belt. She was surprised by the near constant level of communication required as an EM.
Coming from an IC role where I could just put on my headphones and work uninterrupted for hours, I was shocked at how much of my role as an EM requires talking to people. As an EM, I no longer have a single track focus. I’m constantly meeting with people inside and outside of engineering. The mental load of this context switching is tremendous.
- Amanda Kalantzis
Communication is about more than alignment and unblocking. Gustavo del Pino Mendoza, Engineering Manager at Dave, describes that he’s learning over and over that communication is the foundation of his whole job.
Everything boils down to communication. I tend to be bold. I’m usually the person in the meeting that will say something to get someone’s attention to break the ice. But transitioning to being an EM, one of the things that surprised me is that I need to be more mindful about what I say, when I say it, and how I say it because intent is very different from impact. My communication needs to come from the perspective that I am actually always modeling some sort of behavior to my teammates. I need to be able to manage myself to make more space for the team.
- Gustavo del Pino Mendoza
Insider Insight:
Ease the flow of information by avoiding unnecessary jargon and acronyms.
Tough conversations are the job
Giving direct feedback and resolving interpersonal conflict is a necessary part of helping others grow. Engineering Managers need to develop comfort and competency delivering feedback candidly, honestly, and with care. To do this, they also need to be able to correctly pinpoint root issues and frame them in a way that their reports can hear and understand.
Colleen Briant is an Engineering Manager at Remitly with nearly a decade of IC engineering experience.
While it’s important for high-level engineers to have soft skills, managers actually need to be able to also communicate about soft skills. Can you deliver hard feedback, especially to someone you like? If someone on your team is not delivering what they should be, you need to talk about it and be willing to take on the emotional burden for the sake of the rest of the team.
- Colleen Briant
Insider Insight:
Write out your feedback in clear bullet points on paper. Then, sleep on it and revisit in the morning, and make the feedback 5% more actionable.
Be the bridge between company strategy and engineering delivery
IC Engineers are often presented with too little context about what’s happening at the company level, why it’s important, what’s coming up, and what the impact will be on their work. This lack of transparency can leave many engineers feeling like cogs in a wheel.
Excellent EMs know how to proactively and transparently communicate where they’re spending their time, why that matters, and how they’re making decisions that align with the overall company strategy. With a seat at the table for higher-level technical discussions, they need to serve as a funnel of important context and changes from above and across.
I was on a team as an IC that was doing good work, but nobody else in the organization knew what we were doing or why it was important. So when I went up for promotion, my manager really wasn’t able to communicate what needed to be communicated about my impact. This is why, as an EM, I try actively to provide as much transparency as possible about what success looks like and why.
- Colleen Briant
Insider Insight:
Link up your daily work with the company-level strategy, and help your reports do the same.
2. Develop emotional regulation and self-reflection practices
Realize that empathy fatigue is real, and you can’t make everyone happy
Many people with a natural inclination towards empathy find themselves drawn towards management. But empathy unchecked can lead to compassion fatigue and burnout. While it is often a triumph to have created the space where people feel comfortable bringing you into their personal lives, EMs must recognize that it can be taxing to carry other people’s emotions with you day after day, especially if you have challenging reports.
Insider Insight:
Create a daily ritual for yourself to create a boundary between your work identity and the rest of your life.
Understand your own emotional landscape, or your anxiety and fears will be projected onto others
Many folks try out EMing for the first time within organizations where they’ve been an IC. Making this transition can be incredibly scary. The best leaders can recognize these intense emotions and know how to alchemize them for the benefit of the team.
Amanda Kalantzis transitioned from IC into management just a few months into her tenure at Reforge.
My biggest fear when I got the opportunity to manage my own team was that I had not yet earned the respect of the engineers I had been working with to step up and lead them. The first step I took after accepting the position was to set up a 1:1 with each member to specifically address that concern. I acknowledged that this was to be my first EM role and that I had a lot to learn and requested their patience and feedback. I asked questions about things they liked and disliked about previous managers they’d had, how they thought EMs brought value to the team (or didn’t), and what level of communication they sought from their managers. I walked away from all of those conversations feeling more prepared.
- Amanda Kalantzis
Insider Insight:
Emotions themselves aren’t dangerous — it’s what you do with them that matters. Take a beat to recognize your emotional state before acting from it.
Recognize your power and wield it mindfully
It’s a big responsibility to be on the hook for someone’s career. As an EM, at best you are a catalyst that can help grant others access to growth opportunities and provide them a supportive and sustainable work environment to do their best work. At worst, you are a gatekeeper who prioritizes your own visibility over your team’s psychological safety and success.
I had a manager who I could talk to about anything. She rose above a very toxic culture and I never saw her feathers ruffled once. There was never a moment when the mounting pressure for her had any ill effect on her reports. She was so supportive. On the flip side, I’ve had managers throw tantrums when things aren’t going as expected, or when team members raise concerns about the way projects are being managed. Any time I feel overwhelmed or under a lot of pressure, I remember what it felt like to be treated with the utmost respect and grace by someone who has walked in my shoes, and I strive to maintain that level-headed approach in everything I do.- Amanda Kalantzis
Hillary Bauer describes that part of her role is also to recognize the consequences of a hierarchical relationship and model non-dismissive leadership:
I have to honor the fact that I hold power in relationships now. This means that when I inevitably make a mistake, I really need humility to take that in, own what I’ve done, and shift it for the next time. This requires putting in the time to do the learning, and pushing others in the organization to do the same so we’re not causing harm.
- Hillary Bauer
Insider Insight:
Be cognizant of your impact on others, recognize there are times you may cause harm, and commit to repairing and improving going forward. Treat thoughtful critiques of your behavior as moments to reflect.
3. Learn the craft of facilitation for both technical and non-technical discussions
Listen at every level
You need to be able to listen at multiple levels: what’s going on for yourself internally, what the other person is saying, and what’s not being said but is present in the room. This is a computationally taxing thing to do, so most of us are terrible at it because it’s hard and an act that requires compassion and non-judgmental curiosity about other perspectives.
The biggest personal transition from IC to EM involved thinking less of myself and more about others. Now I think more about what type of work is interesting to the engineers on my team. I think of who on my team would just love to get their hands on a specific new project and who would want to run away as fast as possible.
- Amanda Kalantzis
Insider Insight:
Ask if you’re really ready to put care of others above yourself as a core tenet of your job.
Understand the right context elevation
As an IC, you’ll be directly responsible for consistently writing quality, performance code and delivering features on time. As a manager, you have to shift to understand the big picture as well, and be able to set it up as scaffolding for others: how does the company strategy feed into the technical strategy, and what does that imply about the tradeoffs you’ll need to make and how to balance how much you invest in which projects? How well-staffed is your team to deliver against their commitments, and what’s coming up that you need to get ahead of? EMs need to be adept at quickly understanding what context matters most, to whom, and for the sake of what.
You need to have enough low-level knowledge to stay in touch with the work your direct reports are doing, so you can help them, but you need to also maintain a high-level view to make sure you’re on target with priorities, planning, and strategy.
- Wendy Dherin
Insider Insight:
Establish trust and rapport up, down, and across so have access to the right level of context across the org.
Coach the person, don’t fix the problem
People will come to you from many directions seeking support, and you may try to offer solutions or help problem solve. Great EMs know that they rarely have all the context necessary to solve problems on their own (and trying to do so is unsustainable), so they scale themselves by developing core coaching skills: asking the right question, getting quickly to the heart of the matter, and empowering others to find new perspectives and options if stuck.
Limor Mekaiten is currently an Engineering Manager at Wilco but has transitioned several times between IC and management roles.
It may seem like the easiest way to “solve” a problem is just to apply whichever solution you’ve run into in the past or think will be best, but often it just doesn’t actually fit the needs of your reports. Plus, your team members will learn and develop much more if they can come up with an answer themselves with the support of their EM coaching them through it.
- Limor Mekaiten
Insider Insight:
When in doubt, ask a question rather than given an answer. You really don’t need to be the expert or decider for everything that comes your way.
4. Create and maintain strong organizational and time management systems
Navigate and prioritize inbound requests
New EMs quickly find themselves in a busyness trap: back-to-back meetings, taking requests and inquiries in from every direction, handling motivating issues or requests for promotion, responding to feedback from executive leadership, and more.
Without a system to navigate these fires, EMs will be fighting fires unsustainably. They therefore need to develop an unrelenting focus on their core objective, which is to drive impactful & reliable output, delivered at a specific time. Anything that’s not in service of that objective is likely a distraction.
Carter Bastian remembers navigating what seemed like a never-ending stream of tasks to handle when he transitioned into management:
I distinctly remember feeling a bunch of incredibly frightening things. Everything is broken all the time and it’s going to be this way forever. I have way too much to do, and am going to have to say no to any incoming requests, which is probably going to make my teammates’ lives harder. I’m constantly on-call and I can’t really focus on solving anything because a new emergency will pop up to interrupt me. I’m under intense scrutiny from people who don’t yet trust me but also don’t really know my job well enough to see if I’m doing it well.
- Carter Bastian
Insider Insight:
Being reactive is a skill, but it is also often a default choice. Identify 1-2 things each week you’ll be proactive about instead of reactive.
Accept constant context-shifting as the norm
Chelsea Green (Engineering Manager, 7Factor Software), views her core responsibilities as doing what it takes to efficiently address the needs of their teams and other stakeholders to unblock work.
“I really love being involved at a high level in multiple projects at a time, but it's a struggle to find balance and not feel insanely busy all the time. I'm often prioritizing which meeting is the most important to attend, or deciding which project or team needs extra help and how I can best plug in to provide value to the areas that need it most. I have to have a system to delegate effectively.”
- Chelsea Green
Insider Insight:
Organize your calendar wisely to take care of your body, carve out the focus time you need, and reduce switching from one thing to another that requires intense energy shifts.
Learn to push back effectively
Engineering Management is a craft that requires balancing explicit short-term delivery goals with a long term view of technical hurdles, team growth, and sustainability.
Bianca Curutan (Mobile Engineering Manager, Stride Health) has taken inspiration from two of her own former managers around embodying leadership by knowing when to push back to find this balance.
Sometimes you have to cause just enough friction to challenge decisions without being too difficult to work with. This can mean pushing back on other areas of the business to put more focus and emphasis on technical projects and needs, or pushing yourself or your reports to grow in their careers. It’s all about balance: Technical skills and soft skills in order to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders; being involved and removing yourself where necessary, putting trust in the engineers' involvement while maintaining a high-level understanding of what's going-on; cultivating an environment with growth opportunities and challenges.
- Bianca Curutan
New Engineering Managers may try to prioritize and satisfy everyone's inbound requests, but it's an unrealistic and impossible task to try to make everyone happy. Wendy Dherin (Engineering Manager, Reforge) has recognized that some things need to slide in favor of getting the most important priorities and expectations fully met.
A major part of the job is remaining realistic about what’s possible, given your limited resources, and negotiating a way to accomplish as much as possible without overtaxing your team or yourself.
- Wendy Dherin
Insider Insight:
Only you can set and enforce your own boundaries.
5. Shift your mindset around progress, ambiguity, and change
Expect slower feedback loops
As an IC, you may get used to being able to enact change and impact quickly. This rarely happens as an Engineering Manager because these leaders manage a system, and systems changes pan out over much different time horizons. Quick dopamine hits are rare for EMs. Instead, you need to give yourself and others around you time for changes to permeate the system.
Colleen Briant owns career development, hiring, retention, and performance of her seven direct reports while co-owning the product roadmap, resourcing and sprint planning work with her PM. She describes how EMing requires operating on a longer time horizon:
Ultimately success is about seeing growth in my reports (either officially through promotion or unofficially through a project). It’s really exciting and fulfilling when I see someone handle something that they couldn’t handle effectively before. But that plays out over months and years. You won’t get the same instant gratification that you get from being an IC.
- Colleen Briant
Insider Insight:
Identify one or two commitments that will require patience and persistence. Ask yourself what mindset you’ll need to embody in order to achieve it.
Redefine what progress looks and feels like
There will be days full of meetings where you feel like you’ve gotten nothing done. This role is inherently messy because human systems are messy, and the success criteria are far fuzzier.
A leading indicator that things are going well is actually that people are okay with calling things out that aren’t working well. That indicates a higher degree of psychological safety on the team.
- Wendy Dherin
Shifting into management often requires an explicit shift away from coding, which many engineers lean on as their foundational competency and how they evaluate their own progress.
There can be a bit of a stigma actually against Engineering Managers because they no longer code. So I really had to ask myself if I was okay stepping away from coding work and making the success of my role depend on other people. This is a lateral move, not a promotion. But I personally find it really fulfilling that I get to highlight and celebrate my team’s work more openly. - Gustavo del Pino Mendoza
Limor Mekaiten describes the real need to get comfortable with different measurements of success.
All engineers should ask themselves what drives their own happiness and fulfillment. Is it completing your own product or making your code work? Or about unleashing the potential of others? I’m most proud when I see my team members succeed and get outside their comfort zones.
- Limor Mekaiten
Insider Insight:
Our brains crave a sense of progress and meaning. Write out a sticky note with what meaningful progress looks like to you this week, and put it on your desk or monitor in a visible spot.
Avoid perfectionism and get comfortable with fuzzier, adjusting success criteria
Engineers are evaluated as ICs based on performant, reliable, scalable code. The tendency to want things to work perfectly needs to be reigned in as an EM: with ever-shifting priorities, you often have to let go of the short term perfect solution in favor of the long-view. Sometimes this looks like being less involved in a project to give a report the opportunity to learn from a mistake. Sometimes this looks like selectively micromanaging a situation because the costs of sliding on delivery are too high.
Getting comfortable in a realm where work is high-responsibility but less explicitly defined is surprisingly tough. It’s hard to feel it fully until you’re in it.
- Wendy Dherin
Insider Insight:
When in doubt, ask yourself what you need and how you can get it. Give yourself the balm you so often give others.
Management skills can also make you a more effective IC
People drastically underestimate the difficulty of being a top-tier EM. It’s incredibly challenging to navigate a system whose success state is constantly changing and be at the intersection of so many different stakeholders.
Those that are up to the challenge, however, will develop skills as a manager that will change how you think about your own IC work.
Whenever I’ve transitioned back into an IC role, I've always felt more productive. I had a clearer perspective of what’s most important, better communication skills with the product and management teams (because not long ago I was on the other side), and my code became more sustainable because I understood the business side more.
- Limor Mekaiten
You’ll learn about business domains beyond engineering.
I’m super supportive of engineers spending a couple of years doing a tech lead or eng manager position because I have learned so many things about the way technical businesses work, and the way the industry works that I just didn’t know at all even after a decade as an IC. Having a chance to see how decisions get made will make you a better IC if you want to switch back because you’ll understand and have more empathy about why projects get delayed, or why it’s important to speak up about something in a meeting, or why the best solution may still not make sense to implement.
- Colleen Briant
You’ll better understand the long-term strategy, enabling you to drive better technical decisions.
The first project I inherited as an EM was to integrate a new workflow engine into our ecosystem. I pushed back hard with my Director about why we needed this more complicated technology. What I didn’t realize (that I eventually understood with context from my Director) was that they were seeing the problem not just about what we need today, but what solutions we’ll need soon and in the future that we need to start building now. As an EM, this kind of architectural thinking at a more abstract level that takes team context and company strategy into account was new.
- Hillary Bauer
You’ll become more comfortable with the ambiguity and change management required to collaborate with others.
Managing humans is about navigating much more than just the work. EMs have to be willing to create psychologically safe environments for their reports while also providing structured expectations for what success looks like (and sharing those expectations honestly and clearly). In any environment where collaboration is required, these skills are invaluable.
Most people don’t tell you that Engineering Management is actually about managing emotions — your reports’ emotions, your management team’s emotions, and more than anything, your own emotions. One thing I wish I knew before switching over was that it would be way harder for me than strictly technical leadership. Technical systems are elegant in that you set them and forget them. People systems are elegant because you see people buy into them and practice them day in and day out. You know when they’re working because they slowly become seamless to the point where you forget you’re doing them.
- Carter Bastian
You’ll learn about yourself and where you want to go.
Few of us are born with an inkling that our dream is to become an Engineering Manager. If you have the chance to try it, you’re sure to gain a lot of clarity about what yourself and where you’re headed.
Many people may think of their careers as a single ladder where the goal is always to climb to the next rung, but this is only partly right. Career development may be more effectively visualized as a forest where you're generally trying to climb up the trees, but you may also find yourself swinging between trees (like transitioning between EM and IC roles) or starting the climb over again from the forest floor (like switching to a different track entirely, such as engineering and product management).
- Bianca Curutan
Interested in moving towards a management role? We’re covering these topics and more in our new Engineering Management program, launching for the first time this Spring. Apply to become a Reforge Member today.
