How do engineering managers decide where to focus their team?

You may find many clues in the surrounding context if you know what to look for.

One of the things that managers do, is they build alignment in the organization. And that requires understanding how the company operates. With experience as a leader, you become sensitive to the context. It helps you understand what your team is doing in the larger picture.

It is evident when you see a new manager start on the team. They might not know what to look for or how to tell the difference between a signal and noise. They start listening to everyone and trying to respond to everything. Oh, that person wants to be a senior. The engineering team’s productivity suffers. Technical debt piles up. Product folks need help with the roadmap. Ah yes, a director asks about the headcount plan for next year.

If they try to tackle all of these issues at once, they will probably start to lose the ball. Most likely, they will only pay attention to the most urgent things right away and skip over things that matter in the long run. Which might be very harmful. It causes a lot of stress, and you feel little control over how you spend your working hours. Work piles up, and you constantly have a feeling that something is burning under this pile and soon will explode. Most importantly, this way of working doesn't make you a better leader.

How do you know where to focus your attention? What can help you to identify the best way to distribute your time? Context matters. The dynamic of your team, the role of your team in the bigger organization, overall company direction. These things help you understand the rules of the game and the big picture. Without it, you might be playing basketball on a rugby field.

You need to build a mental model of how the company works and the role your team play in the company. That mental model will help you to run “what if …?” scenarios in your head and predict possible outcomes. It’s just one possible model of reality, there might be alternatives, and the model will require revisions and clarification over time. Yet, it’s a necessary step to get better at your role. An accurate model helps you to gain control of your situation. You're switching from reacting to things that happen to you to doing things that help your organization reach its goals.

What helps you to build your own mental model? Below is a list of things to consider.

Role of the engineering function in the company

I worked as a frontend developer in a medium size company, in the early days of my career. It was extremely difficult to work out all the edge cases on a small screen. I raised an IT ticket asking if I can order a bigger display. Soon after, I learned that every piece of equipment that costs more than $200 must be approved by the general manager of the company. It took me a few weeks of back-and-forth to get approvals and justify my need. Eventually, I got a new monitor and it made me more productive. I wondered why it took so long and why engineers don't have big screens as a standard configuration.

Years later, I realized that how company leaders think about the engineering team will affect many things. If they see engineering function as the backbone of the company, they wouldn’t shy away from buying tools that boost productivity. It also influences how much engineering is present in the room where important decisions made.

Company leaders might perceive software engineering as a cost to be paid. Imagine a typical bank or insurance company. Alternatively, engineering might be perceived as an investment. I believe that the key difference here is that for some businesses, it is absolutely necessary to have engineering in-house to be successful.

This factor might not be relevant to your team, but it will be decisive in what you can and cannot do: Can you buy a license for that tool? Can your team members go to conferences? Is there a learning budget available for engineers? What is the salary band for the roles you’re hiring?

Business direction

Is there a long-term effort in the company towards a goal? It might be a big reorganization, a merger, or acquisition. A major re-platforming, or transition to a new tech stack. Doing something that’s misaligned with the company’s direction will face a lot of resistance, might be impossible, or require significant political power.

I have a friend who worked for a startup which was acquired by a tech giant company. Before that, the startup invested quite a lot in hiring people proficient in a specific programming language. Soon after the acquisition, it became apparent that the goal was to integrate the startup tech into the rest of the business of the big company. This meant moving towards the tech stack of the parent company and adopting a new programming language. Trying to hire or retail people who wanted to stick with the original language was futile.

Plans to scale the business, grow or cut of the headcount also fall into this category. Your team might be understaffed, or your area might have a great potential and solid plan to achieve to grow the business. All that might not matter if there is a global headcount freeze on the company level.

Planning horizon of the company

How long your company plan ahead? It depends on the maturity of the business model and the balance sheet. Does it matter from the EM job. ? A lot!

Have you seen an ex-Google, ex-Amazon engineer joining a smaller company? What they might do is repeat the experiences they had at their previous company. It would add a lot of engineering overhead: writing RFCs, planning north start architecture, building systems for the planet scale. This might be the right thing to do for a big tech, but I doubt that a startup which viability depends on the next funding round in 6 months needs such “investment”. It may be wise or foolish to take initiatives with delayed benefits, depending on the planning horizon.

Current constraints

What's the biggest obstacle the team is facing right now? If the team haven’t proved the viability of their product yet, investing in architecture might be a waste of time. If it takes months to deliver a feature, improving quality might add even more delay. It might be the opposite – you work in a highly regulated area and quality is everything. Often, as a manager, you spend the majority of your time addressing the biggest bottleneck that limits your team right now.

The team might be moving forward well and have a clear plan. Yet, ultimately, you’re pivoting to a time-critical project to comply with a new legislation and avoid massive fines.

Relationships with colleagues

Some things are possible only when you have good relationships. Retaining people, working on long-term growth plans, influencing your peers. These things require the other person to feel confident in you.

I have two stories of promotions that didn’t go through, where relationships made all the difference in what happened after. In one case, I’ve been working with a person for quite some time, they knew my management style, and we had many conversations about career grow with tangible follow-ups. After a failed attempt, we reviewed the feedback, corrected mistakes, and, after six months, re-entered the promotion process. This time everything went smoothly.

With the second example, I just joined a new team. Soon, I learned that one of the team members was working on a promotion case with the manager that just left. In my opinion, the case was a bit wobbly. I tried my best to help with the case, but the promotion wasn’t successful. In this case, I didn’t have a track of record supporting this person with their career, they didn’t trust me on this topic (fair enough). Eventually, that person decided to go into another area and left the team.

In these two examples, trust made all the difference. One person felt confident about staying in the team and working on improving their case, and another person didn’t have trust in it. Sad story. Promotions can be tricky.

Nevertheless, understanding who you can influence is important. Having strong relationships with key stakeholders, especially your direct reports, significantly affects your chances of success in whatever you're doing. Implementing a change that makes total sense, but without having relationships to support it is likely to fail or will be much harder.

Seasonality and company cadence

Are there hot seasons for the business? For e-commerce, it might be a Black Friday sale. For the travel industry, it’s summer. These are external factors to the company, but they impact what you do to prepare for those events. It might lead to a lot of deadline-sensitive projects or a focus on the reliability of the systems.

There are also internal cycles like performance evaluation cycle, hardware capacity planning, budget planning, headcount planning. Some of these happen only once a year. You miss an opportunity if you don’t prepare well at the right moment.

Conclusion

Often enough, engineers grown into managers without a proper training and might take years of trial and error to understand the role. This list is incomplete and classification is arbitrary, yet thinking along these lines helps me sense the context of the current organization and define my course of action.