Ask HN: How do you support your engineering managers' growth?

2 points by redox_ 7 years ago | 2 comments

We have about 90 engineers & 20 products people within our product development organization. Part of those 90 engineers include 15 engineering managers.

As we scale, their role has been shifting from “tech lead + people manager” (because they’re all technical and most of them were previously tech leads) to “mostly people management” because the number of reports they have is growing to 6-8 and it’s hard to expect from them to do great on both the people & tech leadership sides at the same time.

However, some engineering managers are getting bored doing “only” people management (incl. hiring, 1:1s, making the team functional, team rituals, being accountable for the team productivity, etc…) and would like to have “more” ownership/scope.

What have you done on your side? How do you support their growth as (senior) engineering manager without only providing them “more teams/reports”? What scope could they own and how do we make sure it doesn’t take over Product Management?

entity345 7 years ago |

This looks like the age-old issue in technical teams: Some people are 'made' managers when they actually don't really want to do that job (and often they also are not very good at it).

In my view, the overwhelming aim is to have good managers, not to try to dilute the job in order to placate managers who don't really want to do management.

One standard solution to avoid people thinking that they have to go into management to grow, it to provide a technical development path that provides status and money (so-called dual career ladder).

redox_ 7 years ago | |

Definitely aligned with that, and having a technical development path is something we do provide.

Still, some managers are happy (and good at) managing a team of 6-8 but are wondering about their next steps. Is you management career just about getting more direct reports and ultimately managing managers? or something else?