Being a First-Time Engineering Manager: 7 Steps to Become Successful in Your New Role

Either you are new to your manager role or feel lost and need some guidance, I’m here to help. In this post I will share the wisdom I have gathered from countless leadership books, leadership trainings and years of experience leading several engineering teams. I believe that when you execute these 7 steps you’re going to be on your way of becoming a great manager for your team.

1. Know your core values

What are core values you ask? It’s easy. These are values that you are willing to hire and fire for. If somebody in your team goes repeatedly against your core value, you don’t hesitate to fire them. Otherwise these are not your core values which define you, these are just values that you like.

Why is it important to know your core values when leading a team (or just being part of one)? It’s because it determines how easy it is to work together with other people in your team and organization. If your core values clash, then sooner or later somebdy needs to find a new place to work, otherwise the team can become dysfunctional.

There are several guides and even questionnaires in the internet to help you find your core values. My core values for example are these:

• Growth: I’m eager to learn and get better.
• Open-mindedness: I’m open to new knowledge and different opinions.
• Teamwork: I put team goals before personal goals.

2. Hire slow, fire fast

In order to not mess up the team dynamic and waste precious time on onboarding and teaching a new person, you should take time to validate the right candidate during the hiring process. Make sure their values match, that they are technically capable and get along well with your other teammates. There’s no hurry. It’s better to hire the right person in 3 months, than fire the wrong one in 3 months that you hired today.

When you see that you have clearly made a mistake, don’t hesitate to fire the person. Of course you should make sure that you do everything in your power for them to succeed in your team, but at some point you just know in your gut that you have made a mistake. The more you waste time on the wrong person, the longer it takes to find the right one. Get the wrong people off the bus and right people on the bus.

Hire for values, not skills. You should be hiring based on your values in order for your team to get along with each other and be productive as a whole. Skills can be teached, values cannot.

If you are new to interviewing and have experienced managers in your organization then shadow them for some of the interviews to see how they present the organization and how they ask questions. At first it’s definitely not easy to interview strangers and it helps when you have some guidance.

3. Make expectations explicit

In order for your direct reports to succeed, they need to know what you expect from them. For that it makes sense to set quarterly goals which align with your team goals and company goals.

A good framework for setting and tracking goals is OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). I have used OKRs for setting goals successfully several years. It is somewhat tricky to set individual OKRs, but it can be done. It’s about growing individually: gaining specific experience, learning a new skill or leading an initiative.

OKRs are also a good tool to use when want to guide your direct reports to a promotion. You can set clear expectations what they need to accomplish to advance to the next level. If you don’t have a written career path for individual contributors in your company, you should definitely create one as your direct reports expect it from you.

When setting goals, make sure to keep the list short. It’s very easy to end up with 8 priorities for the quarter. I’ve been there and it always ends up in the same way, nothing gets proper attention and resources. If you have 8 priorities you don’t actually have any. Focus is key here. Set only 1–3 goals or focus areas per quarter. The fewer, the better.

Even though setting goals and tracking them is good, you should be cautious what you track and measure. It’s because what gets measured, gets optimized for. You don’t want to incentivize something at the expense of something else important.

If you don’t set specific goals, you still demonstrate your expectation of your team by tolerating whatever they do at the moment. You get what you tolerate. When you tolerate bad behaviour from one or two of your direct reports, it sends a signal to everyone else that this is okay by you. This can only end in two ways: either everyone will start behaving that way or good performers will leave your team. So you need to make sure that you correct the bad behaviour or fire the offenders.

You should ask for explicit expectations from your own manager and other people you work with, if they haven’t already made them clear to you. It takes out a lot of guesswork and wasted time when you know exactly what is needed from you.

4. Schedule as few meetings as possible, but as many as necessary

Unlike individual contributors, managers get their work done during meetings. As you probably come from being an individual contributor, then this part takes time to adapt to. Here are some points to keep in mind regarding meetings:

• You should have as few recurring meetings as possible. Especially if these include individual contributors in your team. Having meetings with other managers to plan and reflect is okay, as your job is to be aware of what is happening in other teams and in the organization as a whole. If you need to set recurring meetings for your team, make sure your whole team is on board.
• 1:1 meetings with your teammates are about listening. This is their time and not yours. These meetings are not the place for you to ask status updates, lecture them or share you weekend adventures. As it’s a private setting, then people are more likely to share their worries and problems with you and you should let them. In order to have meaningful conversations, then nudge them to set topics beforehand for the meeting agenda, either you use dedicated software like Lattice or 7Geese or just Google Docs, it doesn’t matter. Ideal cadence for recurring 1:1 meetings with your direct reports is 2 weeks. If you have a lot of people in your team, then having the meetings once a month is okay too, but they should not happen with longer intervals.
• Batch meetings to afternoons. Make sure that you don’t leave 30 min or 45 min gaps between meetings as this unnecessarily splits periods that can be used for focus time. Individual contributors, especially engineers, need at least 60–90 minutes of uninterrupted time to get something meaningful done. Also in the morning minds are still fresh and it’s good time to get some deep thinking done, so it makes sense to have meetings in the afternoon when your brain starts to wear down.
• Have an agenda and mind the clock. The list of items in the agenda should be short, 3–5 is quite enough and these items should be related to each other. If they are not, then you need a separate meeting. Also make sure that any of the items in the agenda won’t take unproportionate amount time, so you are able to go through all of them and end meeting on time.
• Meetings should end with a decision. Otherwise it’s most probably a waste of everyone’s time. Status updates can be sent in written form and consumed asynchronously. When writing down action items, every one of them should have a person assigned. If it’s something everyone or a larger group should do, then you still need to assign DRI (directly responsible individual) to track that it’s executed. Because shared responsibility often leads to no responsibility.
• Keep the invite list as small as possible. You should invite people whose input is important to make progress or make a decision. This rule comes straight out of Steve Jobs’ 3-point formula of effective meetings. He famously pushed for 3–5 people meetings and not more than that, because with more people than that it become unproductive sea of noise. People who need to be on the meeting just for informational purposes shouldn’t attend, because they can be sent the meeting notes afterwards.

5. Empower your direct reports to manage change

When you’re new in your role you might feel pressure to start making changes to justify your being. Even if you have a good idea to make things better, you shouldn’t force it. In order to accept the change people need to feel the pain and understand how it solves the problem at hand. You need to make sure that your team acknowledges the problem and you can guide them through brainstorming to the solution you had in mind at the first place (or even better solution). You can do that in bigger meetings or during 1:1’s if you feel someone is perfect to be the champion of this particular solution. This way you can empower your team to own the problem and the solution. There will be a lot less resistance to the change when you approach it this way.

Having people in your team stepping up and taking initiative is also good for their career goals. They can practice taking on more responsibility, leading some meetings or doing more complex work. This in turn will lower your burden and you can direct your efforts where it brings more value.

6. Own your team’s mistakes

Who’s fault is it when your direct report messes up? Are they or you to blame? Quite difficult question to answer without context, right? Actually, it’s a trick question. It’s always your fault. It doesn’t matter what are the circumstances. Let me demonstrate how it works:

• Their work is low quality— you weren’t clear in your expectations or you didn’t provide them proper training.
• They do the wrong thing — you didn’t give clear enough instructions to them.
• They don’t get along with other teammates — you haven’t helped settle the differences or did a poor job at hiring.
• They miss the deadline — you didn’t have realistic expectations, you didn’t give them enough resources or you didn’t account for external risks that materialised.

As you can see, whatever goes wrong, you are at fault. Now that you are aware of it you can own it and start improving. Don’t complain, just own it.

7. Trust your team

You should resist the urge to micromanager your team. Especially when you come from being an individual contributor. You probably were very good at it and can’t stand when somebody else is doing a non-perfect job. You should let your team make mistakes so take can learn from them. When they come to you for advice then you can let your expertise shine, but not before. Let the people in your team be problem solvers, not order-takers.

If you still feel that you can’t trust someone in your team to properly do their job, then let them do easier tasks and assign them a mentor who can support them. If you have already done that and you still aren’t happy, then it’s probably a time to let them go.

Same goes for your manager. If they micromanage you and don’t trust you to do your job, then you probably need to start looking for a new job as well.

Bonus: send weekly written updates

As briefly discussed in step 4, status updates don’t necessarily need a meeting. It is much better to share status updates in written form so everyone can read them on their own time.

Usually direct reports give status updates to their manager or to the team as a whole, but it’s also very useful for you to update your team with relevant information. You probably take part in a lot more meetings than your subordinates and therefore are much more informed what is happening in the organization. For your team to be aware of the larger context and be informed about the things that affect them in the future, you need to share that information with them. It’s very easy to become an information black hole by only consuming and never sharing, because you take for granted what you know.

In my recent workplace I sent my team a written weekly update every Friday with plans and decisions made during the week. Also when something major happened during the week I shared my reflection on the event or elaborated on the larger picture. Gathering from the feedback from 1:1 meetings everyone in the team appreciated the information I shared, so I definitely keep on doing that in the future as well. At first it takes quite some time to write down, but when you know that you need to send on Friday you can already start gathering the information during the week and when you have good notes from meetings then it’s actually a breeze to put together. So it’s all about the preparation and discipline during the preceding days.

Recommended books

What has helped me guide me through the experience of being a manger is reading a lot of books about leadership. These are the ones that have influenced me the most.

• Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, Leif Babin
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Radical Candor by Kim Scott
• Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• Road Less Stupid by Keith J. Cunningham
• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson

I hope you found value in these tips and are better prepared on becoming an awesome Engineering Manager to your team. If you would like me to write a longer post on some specific topic I briefly covered here, please let me know in the comments.