The Role of an Engineering Manager

— February 13, 2024 —

[… as part of Trusted Shops’ software engineering organization.]

In the last article I shared a fundamental principle of Trusted Shops’ software engineering organization.[1] It makes sense to read it first to understand one or the other aspect better. This time it’s about the role of an Engineering Manager at Trusted Shops.

Responsibilities

Given the separation of “Working IN a system” and “Working ON a system”, the Engineering Manager is purely focussing on the latter. An Engineering Manager is responsible for multiple Engineering teams. (There are no Team Leads in the software engineering organization. More on the reasoning behind this in a separate article.) The responsibilities boil down to two buckets.

• Disciplinary responsibility: This is meant for all technical roles (Software Engineer, QA Engineer, etc) and mainly focuses on talent development and hiring.
• System responsibility, where “System” relates to the environment teams are working in: This is mainly about the continuous optimization of the setup, solving systemic issues and giving guidance where needed. At Trusted Shops, we are not heading for a dominant disciplinary structure. Quite the opposite, we strive for servant leadership, meaning “Working ON a system” serves “Working IN a system”. The focus is on the teams and the operational work. This strengthens the customer focus and it inevitably ensures that teams become stronger and mature.

Engineering Manager is technical role but with on a different flight level

Serving the engineering organization, that doesn’t mean that engineering manager is a weak role. That’s not the case. And even if coding and other hands-on technical work is explicitly out of scope of this role, it is a technical role.

Engineering Managers are also leading certain technical decisions, especially one-way-door decisions. This kind of decision is hard to change later and therefore requires additional attention. An example could be the introduction of a new programming language.

This example also gives a glimpse about the technical focus. It’s more the tactical and strategic level rather than the operational level.

Link(s)

[1] Working ON a system & Working IN a system

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