On spider graphs, splitting ICs and EMs, and good relationships 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #115
1) 🎽 The split between IC and EMs is moving further away
We always say an EM can do many things, depending on what the team needs the most help with. Taking a page from the fantastic Pat Kua’s article about EM archetypes, EMs may help with four areas:
🔨 Tech — they drive technical decisions, spearhead quality, guide design, and more.
🪴 Team — they coach team members, help with careers, foster a healthy culture, and do hiring.
🚚 Process — they tune the dev process to make it lean and effective. They remove obstacles, maintain alignment, but also scope work and allocate resources.
📱 Product — they liaise with stakeholders to shape the product + technical strategy. They align technical direction with what’s needed by the business.
No EM does all of this, of course!
How you allocate your time depends on many things, like company size, stage, and especially your team’s strengths and weaknesses: does your team have strong technical leadership already? You may take a back seat on that. Are you in high-growth? More work on hiring. And so on.
At any given time, these duties may not need full-time managers, and might be performed by other roles over a fraction of their time.
Traditional hybrid roles, like Tech Lead, or (the infamous?) Tech Lead Manager, are based on the idea that you stick with your IC work most of the time, but also help with some managerial stuff.
As teams grow, hybrid roles naturally split into full-time IC and full-time manager roles (and tracks), but here is the thing: as a consequence of the productivity and autonomy trends, this inflection point seems to be way further than it used to be.
In other words, teams are sticking with hybrid roles (or no managers at all) for longer than ever.
All of this had been already spotted by Aditya Agarwal, ex-CTO at Dropbox, two years ago 👇
How far can you go without formal engineering management? This might surprise some but the answer is: pretty damn far. […]
Modern tooling (Asana, Slack, Gem etc.) has made it vastly simpler to do each of the above in a horizontal, scaled out way.
The limit for bottoms-up planning now is at 50 people instead of 5.
Teams of 100 can stay in sync at the same level as a team of 10 etc. etc.
A lot of the traditionally (good) bureaucracy that management incurred is now being slowly augmented/replaced by software.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t need managers. Like most other applications of AI/Software, humans are augmented, not replaced.
The key thing you need managers/leaders for is to identify what great looks like (be tastemakers) and ultimately also to figure WHAT to work on. […]
How far can you go?
In my experience, you can have roughly 30-35 engineers without formal management. You will likely want some Tech Leads before then but that is way simpler than a management layer.
I wrote a full article about how engineering management is changing in recent years 👇
2) 🕷️ The Spider Graph of Leadership Roles
A few weeks ago I interviewed Malte Ubl, CTO at Vercel. I asked him about how EMs and tech leads work at Vercel, and he introduced me to an intriguing concept.
Malte refers to his so-called spider graph for leadership roles, encompassing PM, Tech Lead, TPM, and EM responsibilities.
Rather than strictly defining roles, Vercel defines duties. This allows for more flexibility: individuals can embrace hybrid roles and fill multiple duties at the same time.
This approach enables the team to adapt to project needs and individual strengths, creating a more dynamic and efficient organization.
So, Vercel has two tiers of engineering managers:
The first tier, similar to Google's Tech Lead Managers (TLM), has substantial technical responsibilities and typically manages between 3 and 4 people.
The second tier is closer to full-time managers, and may oversee between 8 and 12 engineers.
This structure allows for flexible choices based on what individual teams need.
You can find the full interview with Malte below 👇
3) 🪴 Create structure to signal permission
By now we know that one of the most challenging aspects of remote work is creating good, deep relationships with your teammates.
However, despite everyone agreeing on this, intentional initiatives for bonding at work are still rare. Why is that?
I suspect the reason is that this is counter-intuitive to many. Back at the office everything seemed so effortless, right? You didn’t design for personal moments — they were just serendipitous.
Or were they?
Think about the coffee machine in that corner — beside the sofa, maybe. Someone consciously decided to put a coffee machine, and a sofa, there, so you could have coffee breaks with others. Do you have a space for lunch? With some appliances maybe, and a few tables? This is by design, too.
The coffee machine, the microwave, the sofa, the ping pong table, they all create structure for certain things to happen. This structure in turn signals to people that they have the permission to do these things. The ping pong table makes people know they are allowed to play ping pong at work. Otherwise, of course, they wouldn’t know.
This kind of judgment seems trivial in the physical world — either there is a ping pong table, or there isn’t — but it is trickier when you work remotely.
Are you allowed to play a quick online game with a co-worker? Did the company make this game available to you, just like it did with the ping pong table? Are you allowed to talk about puppies at work, if there isn’t a Slack channel to talk about puppies?
As a leader, you should provide structure and permission for things you want to see happen in the workplace.
I wrote more ideas about this in this previous piece 👇
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I wish you a great week! ☀️
Luca