The Engineering Manager Archetypes 📊
A thorough framework to identify how engineering managers create value inside orgs.
Hey, Luca here! Today’s article is from Thiago Ghisi, a dear friend and one of the most thoughtful engineering writers I know.
Over the past two months he created an incredible framework for identifying how engineering managers operate and create value inside organizations, backed by a ton of research + tens of real-world stories he witnessed and collected first-hand.
I am thrilled and honored that he is publishing it first here on Refactoring.
Long before we had words like red or blue, people used quick analogies—“like blood,” or “like the sky”—to describe what they saw. This was fine at first, but it got limiting. Eventually, we coined color names, and that gave us a shared language for discussing color variations with precision.
Likewise, when it comes to people's behavior and leadership, we often rely on vague imprecise descriptions (“he’s too controlling”, "she’s hands-off", "he is a people's pleaser"). But there’s a better way: archetypes.
Archetypes show up all around us—in myths, symbols, stories, and especially in the roles people naturally step into. We recognize them instinctively: the Hero, the Mentor, the Caregiver. But without clear names, we struggle to talk about these patterns with precision—so they remain felt, but unnamed.
Finding and naming these archetypes is like creating a standardized color palette: it streamlines communication and exposes biases. Instead of vague criticisms like “they take over everything,” you might say: “they’re leaning into the Hero archetype”—someone who steps up in high-stakes moments and takes responsibility fast. That taps into shared context and opens up a more useful conversation about strengths, risks, and situational fit.
So, the goal of this article is to provide a thorough framework for Engineering Manager archetypes — built on real-world patterns I’ve observed in fast-scaling startups and Big Tech.
These Engineering Manager (EM) archetypes should clarify the force a manager brings to a team. It’s not about pigeonholing anyone, but rather understanding where you naturally thrive, how to harness your strengths, and what complementary skills will help you grow.
By the end, you’ll know which quadrant you most often lean into and how to leverage it for greater impact.
So here is the agenda:
🧠 Where do archetypes come from — from classical psychology to modern leadership.
🔬 Limits of existing EM archetypes — why we shouldn’t focus only on skills and tasks.
🪞 Images of leadership — moving from skills to modes of operation.
📊 Engineering management quadrants — balancing stability, change, people and execution.
👥 Engineering manager archetypes — identifying both productive and failure modes.
🎯 How to use archetypes — for your personal growth and your team success.
🗳️ How to find your archetype — with a little help from AI.
Let’s dive in!
🧠 Where do archetypes come from
Human archetypes might look like the quintessential engineering abstraction, like design patterns for people, but the idea goes way back. Carl Jung used the term to describe recurring roles we instinctively recognize: the Hero, the Mentor, the Caregiver. He believed these patterns lived in a kind of collective unconscious: a shared mental codebase built over generations.
If a Large Language Model learns from the collective text of the internet, Jung’s collective unconscious is like humanity’s behavioral dataset. Archetypes are reusable modules in this repository, shaping how we respond to leadership styles, team dynamics, conflict, and change—often without us realizing it.
Today, archetypes are often used as shorthand for types or patterns. However, I’m using them more deliberately here—to describe the recurring roles we step into when we lead and collaborate. And no, this isn’t new in tech. 👇
🔬 Existing EM archetypes
If you ask Google or your favorite LLM about Engineering Manager Archetypes, you will likely get a combination of 3 articles, written by some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry: Pat Kua, Charity Majors, and Will Larson.
These are largely different frameworks, with some ideas in common:
5️⃣ Pat Kua outlines five — the Tech Lead EM, Team Lead EM, Delivery EM, Product EM, and Lead of Leads EM.
4️⃣ Will Larson maps four — the Tech Lead Manager, Team Manager, Group Manager, and Executive Manager.
7️⃣ Charity Majors describes seven — which reflect managers’ backstories or frustrations.
For the sake of clarity, these are incredible authors: they have made enormous contributions to our understanding of engineering management. I have learned a lot from them and am super thankful for their efforts (so the following is not a critique of them by any means).
At the same time, I believe that, as an industry, we still haven’t cracked the foundational archetypes of engineering managers. Let me explain.
One of the core qualities that make archetypes valuable is that they stay put over time. A foundational archetype should be unaffected by:
🪜 Career level — you should be able to find implementations of the same archetype across all / most career levels, just with different scope and complexity.
🏢 Company scale — whether you’re in a 10-person startup or Big Tech, the core behavioral pattern should remain recognizable.
🪞 Leadership identity — archetypes should reflect how someone creates leverage, not just what function or title they currently hold.
So how do the existing archetypes fare on this? It’s… complicated.
Let’s take Tech Lead EM as an example. I have seen this and this is especially true at the “M1/M2 level or L5/L6 level” (first level management) in most tech companies, but it completely falls apart beyond that. At M3+, no one is still a Tech Lead EM. Why? Because that mode doesn’t scale.
This description resembles more a transitional role or function, instead of describing an archetype that persists across contexts. Past a certain point, being a Tech Lead is a fork toward the Staff+ IC path, not a leadership model that holds over time for engineering managers.
The same applies to Delivery EM and Product EM. In my experience (especially in the US), these labels tend to describe people who transitioned into management from adjacent functions: TPMs, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts, Product Owners, and most of the time, they either evolve out of that identity or stall.
These archetypes break down as careers evolve, reinforcing the need for foundational archetypes that endure.
A Delivery EM in a 1-squad setup might thrive. But what happens when that EM inherits 3 squads across multiple time zones, or becomes responsible for org-wide processes? The old identity no longer fits. The Tech Lead EM who once owned the architecture of a small team is now buried under coordination, people issues, and cross-cutting dependencies.
Finally, on the Leads of Leads EM, Group Manager and Executive Manager, we are basically replicating the career ladder/levels/job titles with different names. They are framed by function/level/skill, not by leverage mode.
They are about tasks, not narratives. They describe what someone does, not the kind of story they tend to embody as a leader—especially in moments of uncertainty, conflict, or change.
For this reason, EMs often don’t really recognize themselves into these archetypes, and resort to using a mix of them 👇
This mismatch is why I believe we need a fresh lens—one that goes beyond job titles, skill sets, or frustration levels and digs into the actual leverage a manager provides.
So let’s try to build on the shoulders of giants, taking inspiration from these frameworks plus broader leadership research 👇
🪞 Images of Leadership
Frustrated by the lack of robust “real-world” EM archetypes in tech, I went hunting in other fields—from law to medicine to going to historical HBR articles—to see if anyone had found a more realistic model.
Most frameworks I found either repeated the same mistakes or applied to entirely different contexts. Many articles or research papers hinted at archetypal leadership, but they likewise blurred lines between skill sets, motivations, and organizational scope.
Then I discovered “The Archetypal Images of Leadership” by Shirshendu Pandey (Journal of Organisation and Human Behaviour, 2018).
It's built on the psychological theory of Carl Jung and organizational psychology, proposing four archetypal leader images:
🔒 Administrator — focused on maintenance and functioning, through stability and security.
🪴 Guide — focused on humanistic growth and supporting others, through affiliation and bonding.
🏆 Achiever — focused on victory and success, through sheer drive and achievement.
🔋 Catalyst — focused on transformation and innovation, through inspiration and engagement.
This study was a game-changer to me because it spoke to unconscious projections: how people naturally see leaders, not just how leaders label themselves.
That paper led me to other, related, archetypical models:
Eight Archetypes of Leadership — by Manfred Kets de Vries’, which identifies Strategists, Change-Catalysts, Transactors, and more.
Competing Values Framework — from Robert Quinn, which maps cultural archetypes (like Producer, Mentor, Innovator) to organizational behavior.
What all these models have in common is they focus on how leaders drive impact.
Behaviors like driving change, hardening processes, or nurturing people's development finally feel like core modes of operation, rather than skills or tasks.
And that’s exactly what I was looking for!
Now, what we are left to do is tailor this approach to tech industry dynamics — like scaling teams, product iterations, or the nuanced split between hands-on engineering and strategic alignment.
So let’s piece together insights from each model to build a simpler, quadrant-based model for EMs 👇
📊 The Engineering Management Quadrants
At first glance, engineering management covers two obvious domains:
🚚 Execution — driving delivery and unblocking teams.
🙋♀️ People — building culture, retaining and growing talent.
But there’s a hidden third dimension that often goes unspoken: managing change.
Whether you’re rolling out new team processes, absorbing a reorg, or bridging product pivots, an EM’s real job is guiding people and execution through change.
Everything else—technical acumen, business insight, stakeholder engagement—ultimately boils down to how you embrace or hold back change in both your team’s work and mindset.
So, it feels natural that managers generally fall along two axes, based on:
Hey, Luca here! Today’s article is from Thiago Ghisi, a dear friend and one of the most thoughtful engineering writers I know.
Over the past two months he created an incredible framework for identifying how engineering managers operate and create value inside organizations, backed by a ton of research + tens of real-world stories he witnessed and collected first-hand.
I am thrilled and honored that he is publishing it first here on Refactoring.
Long before we had words like red or blue, people used quick analogies—“like blood,” or “like the sky”—to describe what they saw. This was fine at first, but it got limiting. Eventually, we coined color names, and that gave us a shared language for discussing color variations with precision.
Likewise, when it comes to people's behavior and leadership, we often rely on vague imprecise descriptions (“he’s too controlling”, "she’s hands-off", "he is a people's pleaser"). But there’s a better way: archetypes.
Archetypes show up all around us—in myths, symbols, stories, and especially in the roles people naturally step into. We recognize them instinctively: the Hero, the Mentor, the Caregiver. But without clear names, we struggle to talk about these patterns with precision—so they remain felt, but unnamed.
Finding and naming these archetypes is like creating a standardized color palette: it streamlines communication and exposes biases. Instead of vague criticisms like “they take over everything,” you might say: “they’re leaning into the Hero archetype”—someone who steps up in high-stakes moments and takes responsibility fast. That taps into shared context and opens up a more useful conversation about strengths, risks, and situational fit.
So, the goal of this article is to provide a thorough framework for Engineering Manager archetypes — built on real-world patterns I’ve observed in fast-scaling startups and Big Tech.
These Engineering Manager (EM) archetypes should clarify the force a manager brings to a team. It’s not about pigeonholing anyone, but rather understanding where you naturally thrive, how to harness your strengths, and what complementary skills will help you grow.
By the end, you’ll know which quadrant you most often lean into and how to leverage it for greater impact.
So here is the agenda:
🧠 Where do archetypes come from — from classical psychology to modern leadership.
🔬 Limits of existing EM archetypes — why we shouldn’t focus only on skills and tasks.
🪞 Images of leadership — moving from skills to modes of operation.
📊 Engineering management quadrants — balancing stability, change, people and execution.
👥 Engineering manager archetypes — identifying both productive and failure modes.
🎯 How to use archetypes — for your personal growth and your team success.
🗳️ How to find your archetype — with a little help from AI.
Let’s dive in!
🧠 Where do archetypes come from
Human archetypes might look like the quintessential engineering abstraction, like design patterns for people, but the idea goes way back. Carl Jung used the term to describe recurring roles we instinctively recognize: the Hero, the Mentor, the Caregiver. He believed these patterns lived in a kind of collective unconscious: a shared mental codebase built over generations.
If a Large Language Model learns from the collective text of the internet, Jung’s collective unconscious is like humanity’s behavioral dataset. Archetypes are reusable modules in this repository, shaping how we respond to leadership styles, team dynamics, conflict, and change—often without us realizing it.
Today, archetypes are often used as shorthand for types or patterns. However, I’m using them more deliberately here—to describe the recurring roles we step into when we lead and collaborate. And no, this isn’t new in tech. 👇
🔬 Existing EM archetypes
If you ask Google or your favorite LLM about Engineering Manager Archetypes, you will likely get a combination of 3 articles, written by some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry: Pat Kua, Charity Majors, and Will Larson.
These are largely different frameworks, with some ideas in common:
5️⃣ Pat Kua outlines five — the Tech Lead EM, Team Lead EM, Delivery EM, Product EM, and Lead of Leads EM.
4️⃣ Will Larson maps four — the Tech Lead Manager, Team Manager, Group Manager, and Executive Manager.
7️⃣ Charity Majors describes seven — which reflect managers’ backstories or frustrations.
For the sake of clarity, these are incredible authors: they have made enormous contributions to our understanding of engineering management. I have learned a lot from them and am super thankful for their efforts (so the following is not a critique of them by any means).
At the same time, I believe that, as an industry, we still haven’t cracked the foundational archetypes of engineering managers. Let me explain.
One of the core qualities that make archetypes valuable is that they stay put over time. A foundational archetype should be unaffected by:
🪜 Career level — you should be able to find implementations of the same archetype across all / most career levels, just with different scope and complexity.
🏢 Company scale — whether you’re in a 10-person startup or Big Tech, the core behavioral pattern should remain recognizable.
🪞 Leadership identity — archetypes should reflect how someone creates leverage, not just what function or title they currently hold.
So how do the existing archetypes fare on this? It’s… complicated.
Let’s take Tech Lead EM as an example. I have seen this and this is especially true at the “M1/M2 level or L5/L6 level” (first level management) in most tech companies, but it completely falls apart beyond that. At M3+, no one is still a Tech Lead EM. Why? Because that mode doesn’t scale.
This description resembles more a transitional role or function, instead of describing an archetype that persists across contexts. Past a certain point, being a Tech Lead is a fork toward the Staff+ IC path, not a leadership model that holds over time for engineering managers.
The same applies to Delivery EM and Product EM. In my experience (especially in the US), these labels tend to describe people who transitioned into management from adjacent functions: TPMs, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts, Product Owners, and most of the time, they either evolve out of that identity or stall.
These archetypes break down as careers evolve, reinforcing the need for foundational archetypes that endure.
A Delivery EM in a 1-squad setup might thrive. But what happens when that EM inherits 3 squads across multiple time zones, or becomes responsible for org-wide processes? The old identity no longer fits. The Tech Lead EM who once owned the architecture of a small team is now buried under coordination, people issues, and cross-cutting dependencies.
Finally, on the Leads of Leads EM, Group Manager and Executive Manager, we are basically replicating the career ladder/levels/job titles with different names. They are framed by function/level/skill, not by leverage mode.
They are about tasks, not narratives. They describe what someone does, not the kind of story they tend to embody as a leader—especially in moments of uncertainty, conflict, or change.
For this reason, EMs often don’t really recognize themselves into these archetypes, and resort to using a mix of them 👇
This mismatch is why I believe we need a fresh lens—one that goes beyond job titles, skill sets, or frustration levels and digs into the actual leverage a manager provides.
So let’s try to build on the shoulders of giants, taking inspiration from these frameworks plus broader leadership research 👇
🪞 Images of Leadership
Frustrated by the lack of robust “real-world” EM archetypes in tech, I went hunting in other fields—from law to medicine to going to historical HBR articles—to see if anyone had found a more realistic model.
Most frameworks I found either repeated the same mistakes or applied to entirely different contexts. Many articles or research papers hinted at archetypal leadership, but they likewise blurred lines between skill sets, motivations, and organizational scope.
Then I discovered “The Archetypal Images of Leadership” by Shirshendu Pandey (Journal of Organisation and Human Behaviour, 2018).
It's built on the psychological theory of Carl Jung and organizational psychology, proposing four archetypal leader images:
🔒 Administrator — focused on maintenance and functioning, through stability and security.
🪴 Guide — focused on humanistic growth and supporting others, through affiliation and bonding.
🏆 Achiever — focused on victory and success, through sheer drive and achievement.
🔋 Catalyst — focused on transformation and innovation, through inspiration and engagement.
This study was a game-changer to me because it spoke to unconscious projections: how people naturally see leaders, not just how leaders label themselves.
That paper led me to other, related, archetypical models:
Eight Archetypes of Leadership — by Manfred Kets de Vries’, which identifies Strategists, Change-Catalysts, Transactors, and more.
Competing Values Framework — from Robert Quinn, which maps cultural archetypes (like Producer, Mentor, Innovator) to organizational behavior.
What all these models have in common is they focus on how leaders drive impact.
Behaviors like driving change, hardening processes, or nurturing people's development finally feel like core modes of operation, rather than skills or tasks.
And that’s exactly what I was looking for!
Now, what we are left to do is tailor this approach to tech industry dynamics — like scaling teams, product iterations, or the nuanced split between hands-on engineering and strategic alignment.
So let’s piece together insights from each model to build a simpler, quadrant-based model for EMs 👇
📊 The Engineering Management Quadrants
At first glance, engineering management covers two obvious domains:
🚚 Execution — driving delivery and unblocking teams.
🙋♀️ People — building culture, retaining and growing talent.
But there’s a hidden third dimension that often goes unspoken: managing change.
Whether you’re rolling out new team processes, absorbing a reorg, or bridging product pivots, an EM’s real job is guiding people and execution through change.
Everything else—technical acumen, business insight, stakeholder engagement—ultimately boils down to how you embrace or hold back change in both your team’s work and mindset.
So, it feels natural that managers generally fall along two axes, based on:
How they handle Stability vs Change, and
Whether they default to Execution vs People
Putting them on a 2×2 matrix, we are able to clearly map the four classical leadership archetypes by Pandey and slightly adapt some of their names for the context of Engineering Management — each reflecting a unique approach to balancing execution, people, and, crucially, the pace and depth of change:
Administrator → 🧰 Operator (Stability + Execution) — focused on predictability, process discipline, and operational control. Think robust project plans, clear milestones, and minimal surprises.
Guide → 🪴 Guide (Stability + People) — prioritizes nurturing, safety, and team culture. This is the mentor figure, ensuring strong relationships, skill development, and psychological safety above all.
Achiever → 🏁 Driver (Change + Execution) — embodies velocity, ambition, and technical or product transformation. These managers thrive on pushing the envelope, delivering new features or bold initiatives quickly.
Catalyst → 🔋 Catalyst (Change + People) — focuses on storytelling, cultural shifts, and strategic influence. Catalysts excel at inspiring teams to embrace new directions and adapt to evolving org priorities.
By identifying where you land, you can see how you naturally handle the flux that defines engineering management—and consciously tweak your style when circumstances demand it.
↔️ The Horizontal Axis — reveals whether you rely on execution and hard power, or if you scale by uplifting people, culture, and soft power.
↕️ The Vertical Axis — measures how you approach the system: do you optimize it for steadiness or keep pushing it to evolve?
Put together, it’s a handy compass for understanding your natural managerial style. Do you crave predictability and operational rigor? You’re leaning towards Operator. Do you fuel change but anchor it in personal connections? You’re veering towards Catalyst.
Your quadrant reveals the style you default to under pressure — the role you naturally play in moments of chaos (or calm). It’s not a rigid label, but rather your center of gravity.
Many great EMs can shift between quadrants as situations demand — just as top athletes adapt their gameplay for a specific opponent. Still, knowing your home quadrant helps you 1) leverage your strengths and 2) partner with others whose primary archetypes complement yours.
Next, let’s explore these archetypes in detail: what they look like on real teams, where they shine, and the warning signs that you might be overusing your favorite move 👇
👥 Engineering Manager Archetypes
The mental map above shows how different EMs achieve leverage — either by stabilizing and scaling systems, nurturing team culture, spearheading outcomes, or reframing the entire game.
Unlike purely academic names, they capture the everyday patterns I’ve seen in engineering organizations for over a decade, like:
The Operator who keeps things running on schedule and is constantly fine tuning processes, rituals and incrementally increasing reliability
The Guide who prioritizes people, culture, development, and keep teams and individuals engaged and aligned during tough times
The Driver who pushes for ambitious projects and outcomes
The Catalyst who reshapes entire systems with a bold inspirational vision
So, this model is successful if you are able to identify co-workers who embody these archetypes, and nod in agreement! That’s what I tried to do to stress test the model: I compared it to real promotion data: 50+ individual EM case studies I accumulated over the last 5 years in performance calibrations and promotion committees I was part of.
The results were eye-opening and added real depth. I saw how a Driver ran into organizational friction when they failed to evolve toward more people-centric leadership. I also saw multiple Operators thrive while scaling and stabilizing immature systems under growing demand, but struggle in early-stage zero-to-one projects where ambiguity is high and the ability to decide fast and adapt on the fly is essential.
In other words, real-world stories were not only useful to match these archetypes and ground them to reality, but also to figure out 1) how they each shine in certain environments, and 2) what are their common failure modes, when overdone or applied in the wrong context 👇
Once I applied this table to the promotion cases I've collected, it became clear that each quadrant presents variations, or sub-archetypes.
In the real world, an Operator can show up as a productive Organizer or a strict Bureaucrat. A Guide can be a nurturing Mentor or a pampering Comforter. A Driver can show up as an inspiring Finisher or a punishing Dictator. A Catalyst can be a bold Visionary or a volatile Chaos-Spinner.
These nuances especially surfaced when I listened to Michael “Rands” Lopp’s podcast on manager types. He highlighted productive styles like The Mentor Manager or The Advocate, but also unproductive ones like The Dictator or The Snake. Each style has a superpower when used correctly—and a major downside if you let it run unchecked.
So I tried to fold these variations into the quadrant model, creating a sort of menu of productive archetypes and anti-patterns for each of the four quadrants, backed by stories I have seen myself. This approach should help teams (and leadership) build a shared language for the leadership patterns that show up—both the productive and the problematic.
Here they are:
1) 🧰 Operator Archetypes
Think of them as the run-the-business EMs.
Maintains order, structure, policies. Process enforcer. Process-oriented EMs. Excel at scaling rituals (on-call, reviews, roadmaps). Often strong in mature teams or regulated contexts.
Productive modes
🧰 The Operator – Keeps the engine humming. Champions predictable output and operational rigor.
🗂 The Organizer – Codifies cadence, creates clarity. Brings just enough process to scale without friction.
🔀 The Broker – Routes work with precision. Balances flow, prioritizes like a traffic controller.
🛡 The Guardian – Oversees reliability and safeguards uptime.
🗺 The Architect – Builds guardrails, not gates. Elevates the floor with thoughtful infra and platform bets.
Anti-Patterns
🧮 The Bureaucrat – Process is the product. Paperwork > outcomes.
📞 Pager Hero – Addicted to being the fix-it savior. Prevents system resilience.
🧲 Control Freak – Centralizes everything. Blocks autonomy.
📏 Micrometer – Obsesses over metrics instead of meaning.
🚨 The Worrier – Always anxious. Kills momentum with worst-case scenarios.
2) 🪴 Guide Archetype
The grow-and-glue-the-humans zone — spans from mentors to culture shapers.
Developer of people, values-driven, builds commitment and culture. Team builders and coaches. Prioritize psychological safety, mentorship, and internal mobility. Strong at shaping culture.
Productive modes
🪴 The Guide – Nurtures and coaches effectively. A mentor disguised as a manager.
🔗 The Liaison – Builds bridges across teams. Translates context, prevents silos.
🥇 The Champion – Amplifies voices. Ensures great ideas get airtime and support.
🎓 The Mentor – Pattern-shares with precision. Invests deeply in developing future leaders.
🤝 The Diplomat – Smooths conflict without sugarcoating. Creates safety and accountability.
Anti-Patterns
🛋 The Comforter – Prioritizes harmony over candor. Ruinous empathy.
🕳️ Emotional Sponge – Absorbs team pain instead of helping resolve it.
📋 Process Nurse – Keeps outdated rituals alive out of tradition or fear.
🪞 The Mirror – Reflects others’ needs without developing a POV or leadership stance.
🙈 The Optimist – Refuses to confront emerging dysfunction. Sunshine blindness.
3) 🏁 Driver Archetype
Fast, high-output EMs.
Goal-obsessed, outcome-driven leaders. Delivery-obsessed EMs who excel in OKRs, quarterly planning, execution tracking. Often PM-aligned. Seen as high performers, but risk being seen as transactional.
Productive modes
🏁 The Driver – Sets the pace and clears the path to get there. Turns vision into momentum.
🏗 The Builder – Crafts systems with speed and purpose. Scales from MVP to durable product.
⏱ The Finisher – Brings clarity to chaos. Always closes the loop.
🧯 The Fixer – Drops into fires, comes out with a plan. Turns red alerts into learning loops.
🧩 The Shaper – Defines direction in fuzzy terrain. Aligns execution to evolving goals.
Anti-Patterns
🐎 Cowboy – Fast, loose, and unscalable. Often mistaken for a hero.
🔨 The Dictator – Fear-driven control. Kills collaboration.
🪓 Refactor Warrior – Loves technical purity more than business outcomes.
📦 Feature Machine – Over-indexes on output. Ignores quality, users, and strategy.
🦴 Underscaler – MVPs everything. Can’t build for durability or scale.
4) 🔋 Catalyst Archetype
Org changers and storytellers.
Change agents, visionary, bold and transformative. EMs who lead reorgs, rewrite processes, or challenge legacy thinking. Thrive in ambiguity. Risk rejection in stable systems; need senior sponsorship.
Productive modes
🌀 The Change Catalyst – Drives cultural and strategic change through vision and clarity. Turns uncertainty into collective movement.
🛠 The Reformer – Methodically rewires broken processes, policies and systems.
📣 The Advocate – Champions what matters. Aligns the org around purpose.
📖 The Storyteller – Crafts compelling narratives. Makes vision sticky and strategy legible.
💡 The Visionary – Sees what’s next. Anchors change in meaning, not just motion.
Anti-Patterns
🌫 The Abstraction Layer – Speaks in elegant visions, never gets concrete. Detached from reality.
🐍 The Snake – Mimics collaboration and vision, but maneuvers politically to gain power—not impact.
🎭 The Thought Leader™ – Leads for optics, not impact. More concerned with looking good than doing the work. Reputation > results.
🎨 The Ideator – Floods the org with ideas, but owns none. Momentum dies in brainstorm mode.
🌪 Chaos Spinner – Pushes for progress through nonstop urgency. Keeps the org in a permanent state of turbulence.
Seeing the four foundational archetypes bloom into countless sub-archetypes and anti-patterns has been enlightening. It underscores how each style can be deployed for massive positive impact, or misused in ways that undermine trust and productivity.
🎯 How can you use archetypes?
By now, 4000 words deep into this research, many of you might be asking: how are these quadrants and archetypes models really useful?
How can they help me at the individual or even at the team or at the company or finally at the industry level? How can they change my day-to-day?
I have two answers here, on a personal and a team level:
1) 🙋♀️ Archetypes for yourself
Identifying your primary quadrant acts like a personal GPS for leadership growth.
This leads to more effective self-reflection and coaching. A Guide who recognizes they’re weak on execution can proactively pair with a Driver for project-based learning—or adopt new habits around delivery metrics. Meanwhile, a Driver can learn from a Guide on how to nurture talent without losing momentum. Having a shared language—“I’m a Catalyst who needs an Operator’s structure”—makes these conversations both clearer and more productive.
It's important to remember that these archetypes represent your center of gravity—your natural inclination, where you have the highest leverage—rather than a fixed box. The most effective leaders adapt their style and consciously draw from different archetypes as situations demand.
2) 🎽 Archetypes for your team
At the team level, archetypes shine in staffing and performance management.
If a big product pivot is on the horizon, you might rotate into a Catalyst to shake up the status quo—or if velocity is stalling, you add a Driver who thrives on execution. Identifying each manager’s quadrant helps you see where your org might be lopsided. Too many Operators? You’re stable but you risk stagnation. Too many Drivers? Expect a lot of shipping—plus burnout unless you infuse some cultural care.
This extends naturally to org design and reorg planning. Balance isn’t about making everyone a jack of all trades; it’s about mixing complementary styles.
Finally, at the industry level, frameworks like this create a common vocabulary.
Whether you’re interviewing candidates or sharing promo docs, it’s easier to say, “We’re looking for a strong Operator with Guide tendencies,” than to list 20 bullet points of job duties. It fosters more focused questions, faster alignment, and a sharper sense of what success looks like.
Ultimately, these quadrants and archetypes serve as a practical lens, helping managers, teams, and entire orgs operate with greater clarity and impact.
🔍 Finding your primary archetype?
Finally, let’s say you’ve read the quadrants and the four foundational EM archetypes, but you still can't tell what your primary archetype is from the top of your head.
No problem!
LLMs these days can do a fantastic job at clustering & pattern-matching. They just need some guidance to go in the right direction and a lot of context (almost as much as you can give!)
I suggest you do it in two prompts:
Quadrant placement
Primary Archetype & Failure Modes
Strip out any sensitive data you might have, and give it:
Recent performance reviews
Brag documents
360 peer feedback (it could be LinkedIn endorsements, or even Slack snippets praising or critiquing how you operate)
Your bio or your resume with your top accomplishments under each position
Your strengths and areas of development.
By feeding these artifacts into a well-crafted prompt, you can get an AI-generated “best guess” of which quadrant and archetype resonates most with your track record.
Of course, LLMs aren't perfect, but having this external perspective can spark your curiosity and increase your self-awareness in ways you might not expect.
To do this effectively, you’ll want to structure your prompt with a clear goal, desired return format, and relevant context. It often helps to specify any disclaimers. Below are the sample prompts you can adapt:
1) 📊 Quadrant Placement
Goal: “Identify my primary EM Quadrant and where exactly I'm situated on the 2x2 matrix based on the following model:
X-axis: "🧱Stability & Process" ←→ "🔥Change & Innovation"
Y-axis: "📈Execution & Results" ←→ "🧠 People & Culture"
Q1: Operator (Stability & Process + Execution & Results)
Q2: Guide (Stability & Process + People & Culture)
Q3: Driver (Change & Innovation + Execution & Results)
Q4: Change Catalyst (Change & Innovation + People & Culture)”
Return Format: “Provide a short paragraph describing which quadrant I mostly align with, plus bullet points on key evidence and any tensions.
Quadrant Pick (Q1, Q2, Q3, or Q4) or if you suspect a hybrid.
Key Evidence (which behaviors align with Stability vs. Change, Execution vs. People).
Any Tensions or contradictory behaviors that might place me near the boundary between two quadrants.”
Context:
My latest performance review comments.
LinkedIn recommendations/endorsement from co-worker.
Key accomplishments from my resume.
Any self-assessment or brag docs.
My main strengths and areas of development
Warnings:
Highlight common threads or patterns from the feedback, not outliers.
Context dump [almost the more the better — prioritize most recent first]:
your latest performance review or your brag document
linkedin endorsements or feedback from your peers (360 feedback)
your bio or your resume with your top accomplishments under each position
your strengths and areas of development
Now that you have the context set on the chat window and the LLM has identified your primary quadrant, your next move is to see which productive and failure modes (out of the 20) might apply in your case.
If you don’t match any example perfectly, don’t rush to create a new archetype. Instead, consider:
Are you operating near the edge of two quadrants?
Are your behaviors clear but under-leveraged?
Are you trying to lead in a way that doesn’t align with your natural force?
The goal here isn’t to invent a new name—but to better understand the pattern you’re projecting, and how it’s landing in your org.
2) ⚖️ Productive & Failure Modes
Ask:
Now that you’ve identified my primary quadrant as <QX>, please map me to the most fitting archetype from the following list. Note any productive archetype I seem to follow and call out any relevant anti-patterns or failure modes based on my quadrant and behaviors. If I appear to span multiple archetypes or sit between two quadrants, include that insight too.
Paste the “5 Productive Archetypes + 5 Anti-Patterns Archetype” relevant to that quadrant. For instance, if the LLM said you are in Q3, you’d paste the Q3 archetypes and anti-patterns:
✅ Top 5 Productive Archetypes
🏁 The Driver – Sets the pace and clears the path. Turns vision into momentum.
🏗 The Builder – Crafts systems with speed and purpose. Scales from MVP to durable product.
⏱ The Finisher – Brings clarity to chaos. Always closes the loop.
🧯 The Fixer – Drops into fires, comes out with a plan. Turns red alerts into learning loops.
🧩 The Shaper – Defines direction in fuzzy terrain. Aligns execution to evolving goals.
❌ Top 5 Anti-Patterns
🐎 Cowboy – Fast, loose, and unscalable. Often mistaken for a hero.
🔨 The Dictator – Fear-driven control. Kills collaboration.
🪓 Refactor Warrior – Loves technical purity more than business outcomes.
📦 Feature Machine – Over-indexes on output. Ignores quality, users, and strategy.
🦴 Underscaler – MVPs everything. Can’t build for durability or scale.
And continue by asking:
Please Provide:
Closest Archetype (from the 5 productive options for this quadrant).
One Paragraph explaining why it’s a match (citing specific behaviors or examples).
Potential Failure Mode or shadow side from the quadrant’s anti-pattern list—if data suggests risk.
Any Unique Archetype beyond the standard 5 if that’s more accurate, with a short name and rationale.
Next Steps (1–2 bullet points) for leveraging strengths or avoiding pitfalls.
3) 🔄 Example Flow
So here is an example execution
1) Quadrant Prompt
You paste in the quadrant definitions.
You share performance feedback: “They reorganized the team for stability, introduced a heavy process, but also invested in people’s well-being.”
You ask: “Which quadrant do they likely belong to?”
2) LLM Response
The model indicates Q2 (Guide) with some Q1 tendencies.
It cites that they’re big on process and building team cohesion, and doesn’t see a strong inclination for disruptive innovation.
3) Archetype Prompt
You now paste the Q2 archetype list (The Guide, The Liaison, The Champion, The Mentor, The Diplomat) and anti-patterns.
You say: “Given Q2, which sub-archetype fits best?”
LLM picks “The Mentor” because they’re heavily invested in 1:1 career growth, yet warns of “The Comforter” risk if they avoid tough conversations.
4) Iterate
If the LLM suggestion doesn’t quite match your experience (maybe they also handle complex project oversight effectively), you can refine it with more examples or ask for a custom archetype name.
📌 Bottom line
And that's it for today! Here are the main takeaways:
🎨 Move beyond skills to archetypes — traditional EM frameworks focus on tasks and skills, but real archetypes capture how managers create leverage and drive impact through distinct modes of operation.
📊 Know your quadrant — the four quadrants (Operator, Guide, Driver, Catalyst) help you identify your natural leadership style and understand where you thrive under pressure.
⚖️ Balance teams, don't clone yourself — great organizations mix complementary archetypes rather than hiring identical managers; a team of all Drivers burns out, while all Guides may lack execution focus.
🪞 Recognize both productive and failure modes — each archetype has superpowers when applied correctly and dangerous anti-patterns when overused; knowing both helps you stay in your productive zone.
🎯 Use archetypes for hiring and team design — whether staffing a crisis project (need a Driver) or culture transformation (need a Catalyst), matching archetypes to context dramatically improves outcomes.
🤖 Let AI help you find your archetype — use performance reviews, peer feedback, and accomplishments with structured prompts to get an external perspective on your dominant management style and blind spots.
📚 Resources
Finally, this piece couldn’t be possible without the following list of resources and inspirations.
The pre-existing tech archetypes:
5 Engineering Manager Archetypes — by Pat Kua
Engineering manager archetypes — by Will Larson
Engineering manager archetypes and career paths — by Charity Majors
Staff engineer archetypes — by Will Larson
Staff+ engineering archetypes at Spotify — by Joel Kemp
Inside Meta’s Engineering Culture — by Gergely Orosz
The psychological and Jungian influences:
The Archetypal Images of Leadership — by Shirshendu Pandey
Eight Archetypes of Leadership — by Manfred Kets de Vries
Competing Values Framework — by Robert Quinn
See you next week!
Sincerely
Luca
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