One of the main questions I've been asking myself when considering moving back to the engineering leadership track was about my future responsibilities.

In the last few years, while working as a Technical Program Manager, I was fortunate to work closely with many talented Engineering Managers and Engineering Directors. Although some of the problems they have been solving were similar, there were still many differences in what they had been doing on a daily basis.

Some were involved in system design decisions, while others delegated this task to their team members. Some dedicated a significant amount of time to establishing a vision and strategy for their teams, while others relied on the product management team, offering support when necessary. Building roadmaps, making technical decisions, interviewing clients, writing code - there are many activities in which some engineering leaders participated, while others entirely relied on their teams.

Because of this difference in the activities of engineering leaders, it was quite challenging for me to understand what I should focus on after changing a role. Nevertheless, after spending some time chatting with trusted leaders and reading various articles and books, here is how I defined my role:

An Engineering Manager in a Product Organization is responsible for creating strategy, building an effective organization to execute this strategy, and ensuring the happiness of its members.

Depending on your company's vision, priorities, and constraints, the problems you will be solving may vary. However, most likely, everything you focus on will fall into one of these three categories I mentioned: strategy, organization, and people.

Strategy

Firstly, I need to clarify something. Almost every time I see a job description for an engineering manager, it mentions that the hiring company expects the candidate to be responsible for defining the strategy for their organization. As a strategy is a consecutive set of problems (it can also be a set of product releases) that need to be solved, I usually say that it's the product manager who's ultimately accountable for defining the strategy, and the role of an engineering manager is to support them as much as needed to ensure that there is a strategy everyone believes in. And this is what I call “being responsible for creating strategy.” You can find more information about what I mean by searching for “accountable vs. responsible.”

Here is what you will likely focus on after starting working as an engineering manager:

• Ensuring the feasibility of a strategy - ;
• Providing tech insights - keeping an eye on what's happening on the market and sharing this information with the leadership team;
• Defining milestones/deliveries -

Building an organization

Here are some activities that fall under this group of responsibilities:

• Hiring people - as an engineering leader, you should work closely with your recruiting team to establish proper hiring processes;
• Defining a team topology - creating the proper organisational setup to ensure your teams are customer-centric, autonomous, and effective. A fantastic book written by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais - “Team Topologies” contains a lot of helpful information about this responsibility.
• Ensuring high productivity - <tbd>
• Creating processes - <tbd>

Ensuring happiness

<tbd>