what does an engineering manager do?
From here:
Andy Grove's equation for measuring a manager's impact, which states that the output of a manager is the output of their team, plus the output of the neighboring teams under their influence.
Other ways to improve your output:
- Hiring and retaining great people.
- Owning the team's strategy and roadmap, and ensuring efficient execution.
- Making decisions to ensure that the team is working on the right things and saying no to the things that don't matter.
- Dealing with fires, escalations, and other crises that pop up all of the time.
- Building a strong culture within the team so that people are engaged, challenged, and motivated.
- Mentoring and coaching your reports so they get better and can have more work delegated to them, thus increasing output further.
- Managing the team's stakeholders so they can offer their steer to the team early and often.
- Actively performance managing the team so that superstars can continue to shine and underperformers can be coached or exited.
- Building close working relationships with other teams so that smooth collaboration happens across the organization, leading to a better and more cohesive product.