Changing Roles: from Engineer to Manager 👔

How to stop thinking as a player, and start thinking as a coach.

One of the most difficult transitions that I’ve gone through, and have since supported numerous others going through, is the transition from being an engineer on a team to being the manager of that team.

I’ve always learned best by reading, so at the time I picked up a copy of Andy Grove’s High Output Management. One of the book’s highlights is Grove’s seminal take on management:

The output of a manager is the output of the teams under their supervision or influence.

But I’m not going to lie – I didn’t know what to do with this idea. How could I increase my team's output?

• I could try to spend more of my time coding.

• I could try to grow my team.

• I could push the team to work harder.

Each idea seemed appealing, but also came with serious side-effects. I was in a tailspin.

The best advice I can ever give anyone in such a tailspin is: step away from the keyboard. (Or, as I later learned from an unlikely source, Dora the Explorer: “let’s stop and think.”)

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This is a guest post written by my friend Louis Bennett. As an EIR at Reforge, he leads its programs on Engineering Management and Technical Strategy. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at VSCO and led engineering teams at Intercom & Trulia.

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Fast forward four years. I’m checking in with a first-time EM on my team, Sasha.

They’re new to the role, and grappling with the same question that threw me for a loop: what is my job, exactly, and how can I be effective?

If Sasha’s job is to deliver impactful and reliable output, how should they think about their role, vs. their teammates’?

I am a big sports fan, and I like to think of this as the transition from being a player to being a coach — things that make you effective as a coach are often quite different from those that make you effective as a player. Just like IC vs EM roles.

Let’s dissect this a bit, using basketball as an example:

• 🏀 As a player, you’re on the court. You’re responsible for executing plays and defending effectively. You may be the captain, in which case you’ll also make decisions in real-time on which plays to execute throughout the game.

• 👔 As a coach, you’re off the court. You set the strategy for the game, and build the plays that the team executes. You’re responsible for ensuring your team is healthy and strong – physically and mentally. And, when the game is not going your way, you’re responsible for picking the right play and/or changing strategy accordingly.

✏️ Creating the plays

The best coaches differentiate themselves by coordinating their team‘s efforts effectively and continuously. Similarly, as an EM, the most effective levers you have to influence your team’s output are the systems and processes of how it works. You set the direction for the meetings you have and the way they run.

Just as coaches watch the tape after a game to plan improvements, you can leverage regular retrospective meetings to address inefficiencies and adjust how you work to improve output every week. Done well, you’ll also have your team thinking about ways to increase its impact.

🔍 Keeping focus on the court (while you’re off the court)

Let’s return to Sasha, the first-time manager I mentioned earlier. 

In their previous role as senior engineer on the team, they were used to taking on complex tasks each sprint, breaking them down, and transforming the sometimes abstract requests into working features. 

As they transitioned into management, their natural bias was to continue to tackle the most complex work each week, contributing to their team’s velocity by completing some story points.

Besides, it felt good to be in an IDE, doing “real work” – a break from back-to-back meetings. As Yurii Mykytyn noted in our community thread, the dopamine hit you get from closing out tickets is real!

What Sasha didn’t realize, though, was that by tackling tickets they were limiting the growth of the players on their team. Essentially, they were taking away opportunities for their team members to learn.

By spending their time on development instead of management, Sasha missed the opportunity to step away from the keyboard and craft a strategy for her team to succeed.

Does this mean that, as a manager, you need to step 100% off the coding work? 👇

🏃‍♂️ The working manager

The idea of being a working manager may be laughable, but it does not have to be a paradox, or a curse. Let’s talk about how and when this is okay: