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Engineering Manager (People Manager Path)

Years of xp (guideline)

Technical Lead Manager Engineering Manager Director of Engineering

8+

10+

15+

Scope of action

Technical Lead Manager Engineering Manager Director of Engineering
  • 1 team / 3-4 directs.
  • 1-2 Products / Key components.

2-3 teams / 6-8 directs

4-6 teams / 3-4 directs, 15-20 total

Scope of knowledge (Breadth and Depth)

Technical Lead Manager
  • Foundational IC management.
  • Team synergy leadership.
  • Technical expert on 1 product / key components.
  • Expert in primary focus area (BE/FE/or Data).
  • Strong proficiency in DevOps, PG/CH, Observability, and other platform technologies.
Engineering Manager
  • Advanced IC management.
  • Team synergy leadership.
  • Talent strategy.
  • Compensation strategy.
  • Culture leadership.
Director of Engineering
  • Advanced managers’ management.
  • Culture leadership.
  • SaaS strategy.
  • Capacity planning, resource allocation, and budgeting.
  • Product strategy.
  • Technical mentorship.
  • Cross-functional communication.
  • Engineering metrics.

Responsibilities

Technical Lead Manager
  • Owns consistent team delivery according to quarterly roadmaps. Makes sure to update roadmaps/OKRs to reflect current work and progress.
  • Acts as a top contributor, consistently delivering on time and on target, even on large tasks, and can define scope to meet stakeholder expectations.
  • Drives teammates’ happiness, engagement, and growth.
  • Collaborates with the team’s PM on inter/intra-team communication, planning, and delivery.
  • Drives adoption of engineering best practices at a team level.
  • Acts as the primary driver (together with EM/PM) of the team’s vision document, driving the planning and delivery towards it.
  • Participate in critical outages and high impact issues meetings if in your area of focus. Help come to a solution with the suitable IC or the technical approach when it is in your area of expertise.
  • Able to create, drive, and communicate big systems architecture decisions and initiatives within the team.
  • Takes ownership of the team’s technical scope of responsibility by nurturing scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
  • Fosters cost-awareness by advocating for initiatives that lead to savings, and diligently monitoring spending across the team scope.
Engineering Manager
  • Drives Engineers’ happiness, engagement, and growth.
  • Operates talent strategy (IDPs, retention, acquisition).
  • Collaborates with TL and facilitates consistent team delivery according to quarterly roadmaps.
  • Collaborates with the team’s PM on inter/intra-team communication, planning, and delivery.
  • Leads team organization and controls processes.
  • Collaborates on planning and contributes to Engineering Operations.
  • Proactively works together with PM and TL to unblock the team.
  • Advocates on behalf of team members.
Director of Engineering
  • Owns accountability for metrics-based performance of their part of the org (eg. retention, acquisition, throughput, quality).
  • Drives EMs’ happiness, engagement, and growth.
  • Operates talent strategy (IDPs, retention, acquisition).
  • Collaborates with Product leadership to define strategy across multiple teams and helps define org-level measurable outcomes.
  • Can drive all internal communication, including cross-departmental.
  • Collaborates with staff engineers to resolve cross-teams dependencies and orchestrate delivery.
  • Drives engineering operations strategy.

Communication and leadership

Technical Lead Manager
  • Makes independent decisions for the team; is actively learning how to handle complex management situations.
  • Contributes to the career development of others.
  • Expected to meet regularly with their direct reports, create openness to feedback by asking for it, use that openness to provide frequent feedback on their work, help the individuals set goals, and work with the HR partner and director or VP to ensure employee growth and retention goals.
  • Communicates team’s vision and mission to Engineering. Proactively clarifies the “why’s” of changes and decisions taken to the team and all stakeholders, creating buy-in on those.
  • Leads and embodies team culture.
  • Use communication to bring the right ICs to the critical outages and high-impact issues meetings and help/facilitate decisions, ensure communication is clear and visible in the appropriate channels and help debrief the outcomes through messages on the proper channels and/or post-mortem documents.
Engineering Manager
  • Manages independently; communicates context to the team and surfaces concise people and technical information to upper management.
  • Able to communicate technical concepts to business stakeholders and business objectives to the technical team. .
  • Sets clear expectations for team members; solicits, synthesizes, and delivers feedback.
  • Communicates timeline, scope, and technical concerns inside and outside OBTs to all relevant stakeholders.
  • Leads delivery of major initiatives on clear timelines.
  • Owns the quarterly Roadmaps/OKR setting and review process for teams under their oversight.
  • Able to identify areas of strategic technical debt and provide cost/benefit analysis for eliminating this debt and suggested timelines for how to prioritize it.
  • Comfortable managing team members with different skill sets and technical areas of focus.
  • Sells Beyond as a company and their organization as a team to potential candidates. Inspires potential recruits to join the company.
  • Leads and embodies team culture.
  • During critical outages and high-impact issue investigations, identify and bring the right people to the group call. Ensure communication is clear and visible in the appropriate channels.
Director of Engineering
  • Collaborates across functional areas to define, prioritize and ensure implementation of specific innovations to improve technical functionality in support of business needs, efficiencies, and revenue. .
  • Leverages past experience and uses strong communication skills to collaborate effectively with all stakeholders, including customers, senior management, and other business leaders.
  • Owns budgeting and compensation management process for their teams.

Competencies focus

Technical Lead Manager Engineering Manager Director of Engineering
  • Deliver Results.
  • Service oriented.
  • Service oriented.
  • Deliver results.
  • Deliver results.
  • Stretegic thinking.

reference: People manager competencies (internal link)

Technical Lead Manager Engineering Manager Director of Engineering

WIP

Checkpoints for reaching this level

Technical Lead Manager
  • Has been a tech lead for 1+ year.
  • Has proposed and participated in 3+ technical planning or designs of large Epics or engineering initiatives.
  • Has presented 1+ times on a technical topic for a PED talk, ideally based on Friday PMs L+D initiatives.
  • Has documented 3+ technical aspects of systems implementation and/or post-mortems.
  • Has stepped through explorative material and checked in with their manager as they consumed said material. For example, recommendations include “Radical Candor” and “Crucial Conversations.”.
Engineering Manager
  • Has participated in mentoring, advocating, and executing 2+ IC promotions.
  • Has stepped through explorative material and checked in with their manager as they consumed said material. For example, recommendations include “An Elegant Puzzle”, “Staff Engineer”, and “The Manager’s Path”, as well as broader choices on business, personal growth, and communication such as 7 habits, 5 dysfunctions, How to decide, Leadership is language, Turn the ship around, Measure what matters, Coaching habit, EI 2.0, Nonviolent communication, Dare to lead, …
Director of Engineering
  • 4+ directly managed ICs are now promoted into the Sr IC path or People Management path.
  • Has regularly contributed to a technical or people management blog or publication over the past 12 months.
  • Has presented on software or management topics to external audiences such as conferences or interest groups.

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