
In a previous article, I covered some of the main aspects of my job asVP of Engineering. It should come as no surprise that one of my activities is recruiting and hiring for my team. I spend a decent amount of time recruiting for various roles within my teams. One of the more challenging and critical roles is that of an Engineering Manager.
My preference has always been to groom leaders - managers and otherwise - from within an organization. This is especially true for the role of a manager. A tenured engineer moving into the role of an engineering manager has a few advantages over an external hire. She knows her team, knows the product and codebase, the use cases and the engineering culture. However, it has also been my experience that few engineers gravitate towards this role. Most prefer to remain on the technical track and continue growing and developing as individual contributors.
Now, as it turns out, we need an Engineering Manager at strongDM and opted for an external candidate, at least for this initial position. So, off to create a job description and interview structure I went!
That in turn triggered an interesting question: What makes a good engineering manager, or any manager for that matter? Answering this question, or at least defining the traits that make a good engineering manager is something that we needed to wrestle with. Otherwise, how would we be able to assess candidates applying for this position? To help explore this question further, I spent time with strongDM’s CTO - Justin McCarthy - to try and answer it.
At face value, the answer is somewhat obvious. Google this question and you will end up with a set of attributes like: good communicator, mentor, good at delegation, empathetic and more of these similar traits. While all of these are indeed important traits, we felt that they lacked the essence of the role. They were necessary, but insufficient attributes. There must be something else that captures the essence of this role.
After some back and forth, and looking back at our own history and experiences, we settled on one trait, which I am going to express as: restrained interception. Allow me to elaborate.
Before elaborating on what that trait actually implies, it’s important to describe the context within which the engineering manager will operate in. One important environmental characteristic is the desire to push down decision making to teams and individuals who are closest to the work. For a software engineering team, that means that the software engineers are tasked with a problem and left to explore how to solve it. They do not need to be micromanaged. In fact micro-managing them would be an anti-pattern. Subsequently, decision making need not be centralized in one single person like a manager, VPE or CTO. There will be exceptions to this, which I will address shortly.
If decisions are pushed down to individuals and teams, who in turn are somewhat self-managed, then what does the engineering manager have to offer? The answer is the ability to inject herself in key decisions that matter. I’ll use the “balls in the air” analogy to further explain this point. A strong engineering manager observes her teams, sometimes deliberately letting balls “drop” and every so often interjects herself to handle one of the many balls in the air, before it drops. The one that she handles, presumably would have had dire consequences had it dropped. The others, even though some might drop, aren’t that important and would offer a good learning opportunity for the team.
The ability to see all of these “balls” and interject only when necessary is hard, and, that is the crux of this role.

A good manager will know what situations - and when - require her to step in.
These situations need not be just scoped to what software teams are working on (Technical axis), but they include team and people dynamics as well (People axis).
Exhibiting this ability requires a high level of confidence, experience (technical and otherwise), humility, selflessness, awareness, delegation, communication, awareness and all of the other adjectives and traits you’d expect to see in articles like “what makes a good manager”
Oh, and I’m hiring for this role. If you think you are a good fit please reach out to me!
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