What should engineering manager & Leadership roles look like in 2024?
Article summary
I critically examine the evolving landscape of engineering management in the technology sector, highlighting that effective leadership does not conform to a one-size-fits-all approach and that a more nuanced understanding of leadership that goes beyond traditional frameworks will better align with the dynamic nature of the tech industry.
Significant industry shifts—like reorganizations and a push towards more hands-on technical roles—have fundamentally altered what it means to be a leader in tech.
I argue against the prevailing notion that there is a standard model of leadership, instead proposing that leadership roles should be tailored to fit the unique challenges and goals of each company.
Key leadership qualities include adaptability, technical and business acumen, and the ability to manage both people and complex projects.
I explore this topic and variations in leadership paths and roles, as well as what it means for building a leadership career, together with guests in my podcast “Leadership Confidential”:
One might think, or at least hope, that, of all places, a career network would be the place for the constructive exchange of different ideas in the spirit of fostering innovation, learning, and growth. But, turns out, it’s possible to get into flame wars on LinkedIn. And an especially great way to start such a flame war on LinkedIn is to ask, “how ‘technical’ should an engineering manager be?”
I’ve been thinking about this question, what engineering leadership roles should look like, for a lot of my own career, and currently, a lot of people in our industry think about it too.
This is a complicated and complex topic - a lot of people have very strong opinions about this. Here’s mine:
I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all for what kind of leader or manager is best for *all* companies.
As someone who’s worked in finance + media + arts and has been following leadership discourse since the early 2010s, i can also tell you that I haven’t seen any other industry where this topic is discussed with such force, outrage, and often largely colored by personal anecdotes; in other industries, people just loathe managers and employees bond over their aversion to leadership, and that’s it.
I’ve been thinking about this question, what engineering leadership roles should look like, for a lot of my own career, and currently, a lot of people in our industry think about it too:
The State of Technical Leadership
After a decade of boom, fueled by cheap money and hot hypes, the tech industry has been going through major shifts: Strategy changes, re-orgs, and layoffs, with even two, three, or four rounds of layoffs in a single company. A lot of these changes have played out directly in how people managers, technical leads, and other engineering leaders spend their time.
Tech leads working at lower levels again, often much more hands-on.
Many companies removed middle management levels in the name of flat hierarchies and “efficiency”, and startup line managers are reporting to busy executives again.
There are fewer people for the same or even more work. Morale is low in many places and change fatigue is high. Where tech companies used to fight to hire and retain great talent in the 2010s, now productivity and efficiency have become the focus, making emotional labor a big part of many leaders day to day work.
Where tech companies used to work hard to hire and retain great talent in the 2010s, productivity and efficiency have become the focus in many companies—and for managers.
Many leaders tell me about “The return of the tech lead manager”, i.e. someone who is responsible for everything from technical strategy + decisions, architecture, people management, and hands-on coding -
Leaders have questions
As a result, a lot of engineering leaders have questions: about what their roles look like now, concerns about what skills they need to develop, ideally yesterday, and where their careers will head.
I want to share with you my thoughts on engineering leadership roles in 2024 and onward, including:
What I found leadership roles have in common, what sets them apart,
Which leadership roles and shapes are right for which company, and which ones rarely work well, and
what to do if you're a leader and unsure about how to navigate the current changes in our industry.
I'm going to try and outline a bunch of different aspects to this topic and hopefully bring a bit of nuance to it because I think it's important. I can already tell you the gist: I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all way of engineering leadership, but I have found shapes that work quite often - and ones that typically fail.
Tech industry dynamics
The tech industry likes to go into extremes. Think of herd mentality, hype cycles, and pattern matching. That even goes for debates around management roles. For a long time, becoming a manager used to be the only way to make more money and move up the corporate ladder. That also meant that a lot of people who've been in the industry for a while had managers or became managers who didn't actually really want to do that work for the sake of the work.
In the 2010s, the idea of people management as a separate and distinct career path took a bit more hold. Unfortunately, in some cases, it also really overshot in that direction. And as we mentioned in the episode, there's currently a correction, likely also overcorrection, into the opposite direction again.
As an industry, we really like binary thinking and strong opinions. And those are understandable, they feed the algorithms, but they're also not always helpful for these kinds of conversations.
lenses to understand leadership roles & needs
I want to share some truths with you that I found about engineering leadership in my career so far. First of all, It's important to keep in mind that the tech industry doesn't exist.
I want to share some truths with you that I found about engineering leadership in my career so far.
1. “The Tech Industry” Doesn’t Exist
First of all, It's important to keep in mind that the tech industry doesn't exist. I often talk of “the tech industry” as well But for the purpose of this topic, it's important to keep in mind that there are lots of nuances within what’s often treated as “one industry”, such as:
Is technology your company’s product, or an aspect of running your business? When I worked at a bank in 2005, I spent the first four weeks of my training in the literal filing department. Digitizing and shifting business models was still only in progress back then. Many technology leaders like to say that “any company is a tech company nowadays”, but there’s still a huge difference between if you use technology primarily as a tool to solve a problem your business has, or if technology is the thing you’re doing.
How is your company funded, and what goals and incentives does it have as a result of that? VC-funded companies tended to go for big growth and fast exits (there’s currently more nuance here again as the VC market has been changing since the interest rate increases in 2021/2022), fast exit versus bootstrap companies that have a much steadier and slow growth very often, or even to stay stable.
Is your company in growth or maintenance or divestment mode? It makes a huge difference.
What sub-industry is it in? Just one example are health tech companies in Europe, and specifically Germany, that deal with very, very tight regulations around compliance. In contrast, quote unquote platform companies like Uber or Airbnb, where regulations often came in after the fact, if at all.
What type of customer and market segment is your company serving? Is it in B2B, or B2C? That's going to make a huge difference.
Tech companies are also different by region. A lot of thinking and conversations about the tech industry are very U.S.-centric, but there are differences even in the U. S. between, say, Silicon Valley companies and companies in Washington, D. C. that are more government-adjacent. And there are, believe it or not, many tech companies outside of the U.S.
And then another factor is AI (??). Many companies are getting heavily invested in this right now. And on the flip side, amidst the ongoing hype and speculation, there are still lots of unanswered questions about what it's going to substantially change in our industry.
2. You don't have to be technical or an engineer to be a terrible manager.
3. A lot of leaders in tech are lacking business fundamentals
In the tech industry, a lot of leaders don't have a lot of training in business and how to talk to business people, but that's a foundational part of why those rules even exist. Management is a business role. Most leadership roles are at least in part a business role as well.
4. Leadership is a skill set. It's not in titles or roles. Leadership can be learned and leadership is at all levels.
5. A lot more organizations underestimate the complexity of people issues and overestimate the complexity of technical issues.
A lot of leadership work sounds pretty simple in the books, in theory, and in the abstract, but a lot of it is just Good habits and consistency. And for anyone who's ever made the New Year's resolution to go to the gym four times a week or cook healthier dinners every night, you probably know good habits and consistency can be really fricking hard.
I run organizational assessments a lot, and I can tell you a lot of companies struggle with similar issues. Like:
Having a strategy and goals that are clearly defined and understood by everyone.
Everyone also knows how their work relates to those goals and how the success of their work is going to be measured.
Communicating regularly and openly about what's going on in the company.
Prioritizing and focusing on the most important things. Also, having fewer than five top priorities. Shockingly hard.
Sharing feedback regularly so people can improve.
Genuinely listening to that feedback and also following up on it.
Everyone takes ownership and is accountable for their work.
Following up and following through on their responsibilities and actually learning from failure and doing better.
Those things that sound quite basic to you, maybe those things are leadership hygiene. They don't sound exactly like innovation, but they are what makes innovation possible. But in order to get there, they take consistent work, time, and thoughtfulness. Doing all of those things consistently, consistently well, and consistently well throughout an entire organization of humans that changes over time.
That is really, really, really hard. I always say that one of the most relieving parts of leadership work is that the issues are the same no matter where you go. And one of the most frustrating parts about leadership work is the issues are the same no matter where you go.
6. The extremes rarely work well
What often doesn't work long-term, sustainably, and in a regular business that doesn't just exist to burn money is the extremes, meaning, for example, leadership roles like a role that is pure people development or pure tech, and disconnected from delivery or business results.
What doesn't work either typically are roles that have a very broad scope and context. Those tend to be roles that are a mix of basically everything. Like people management, mentoring, and development, plus technical leadership, strategy, and decisions, plus delivery management with some components of product and project management, plus hands-on coding. Those kinds of very broad roles, like people who are in them, tend to do one or two of those things quite well. And the things they do well are often the ones that they have more expertise or interest in, or also the ones where there's more organizational pressure, and they tend to neglect the others.
We have a word in German for this, and I promise it's not an insult, even if it sounds this way. The German word is “eierlegende Wollmilchsau”, which literally translates to “egg-laying wool milk pig”. That's a German idiom that describes the ideal of an imaginary hybrid livestock, which combines the advantages of different types of animals. We use it to describe a person, a thing, or a solution to a problem that on the surface seems to only have advantages, and satisfy all needs and all requirements. But exactly because of that, it's not real. If your org has such broad roles that attempt something like the described egg-laying bullmilk pig, it is a sign of unrealistic expectations.
If you're in one of those broad roles, it can be wise to be explicit with your manager about which parts of your role take priority; and it may also change over time!
What skills make a good engineering leader?
Technical and people leaders who are good at their roles have a lot of skills in common:
Handling complexity, ambiguity, and nuance. You can tell them, Hey, here's a problem, please figure it out.
Holding and sharing the purview of a certain context, knowledge, or subject matter expertise that can be at the system level, like in technical systems, understanding certain architecture overall in technical systems or on the people and organizational system side, like understanding the organization inter-team and cross-team dynamics and interfaces between teams.
Good communicators. They translate context between levels and functions so that people who are working with them have the context that they need to do their job well and be aligned with the bigger picture and what's going on around them.
Highly adaptable to changes in business needs, priorities, and people, and often even to changes in their own roles over time.
Switching contexts from like different levels, like talking to individual engineers, debugging an issue, and then presenting a proposal to an executive all over the course of a couple of hours. They switch contexts between topics like people things, technical things, and customer things. As well as different interaction modes, like department presentations, one-on-one conversations, and a leadership meeting.
Good at making decisions in the interest of the business, often with limited information. They make decisions that are good for the whole of the organization, knowing that those decisions will often also not be what's best for every individual in that organization.
A sense of what fires they need to let burn and which ones they need to put out. There's always more to be done than there's time, energy, capacity, and people.
Accountable for results and outcomes of a team, set of teams, department, or organization, and they take that accountability seriously.
You may notice that these skills and the resulting roles tend to have a lot of overlap with other roles that have different names, like technical lead, engineering lead or manager, team lead, product manager, and product manager.
What leadership shape and roles are best for which organization?
This also means what shape of leadership role is best for your organization will depend on which of these skills you need the most:
Say your startup is very small. You have 10, maybe 20 engineers. You probably just need people to be very hands-on in programming.
If you run a very highly specialized research and development organization, you need a lot of deep knowledge and subject matter expertise.
Say your organization is going through a lot of change, ambiguity, and complexity. You probably need people who are great at communicating, coordinating and helping other humans handle those changes.
Or if your company is growing fast, you probably need a lot of skills in hiring, onboarding, integrating new team members, and building teams that perform well.
…And so on.
All of this is why I think that
“How ‘technical’ should an engineering manager be?” is the wrong question
Instead of asking, “How technical should an engineering manager be”, I think we should ask instead:
What impact do we need?
What problems do we as a company need to solve now?
And what problems do we expect to come up in the future? how will we know that this person, this leader is doing well?
My outlook for the future
My outlook for the future is that I think it's going to stay weird for a while. Many leaders right now are in positions that are in high danger of burnout, especially with very broad roles and very high workloads, and a lot of uncertainty to deal with. I also expect as an industry, we'll see a correction again over the next years; after all, this is an industry that likes the extremes and is in constant flux. And the amount of change and flux is very high right now. The current setting is hyper-focused on efficiency in a lot of companies, but that setting is also not sustainable for a lot of them. As markets change and recover, this will shift again, probably again into some overcorrection territory, or maybe even a less extreme setting.
My advice for engineering leaders grappling with this changing industry
If you're an engineering leader wondering about what that means for you in the next years, here are skills that I found worth investing in for leaders throughout any industry shift:
I found that in leaders, a broad skill set is helpful, and so is adaptability. It might be really hard right now to figure out what skills you really need to focus on, especially if a part of your role is hands-on coding. Speak with your manager about this.
There are some universal leadership skills to get good at, and now is a great time to focus on those:
Being able to manage ambiguity and complexity will become increasingly important.
Get good at business things. Speaking business language will be really helpful in how you frame your work no matter what exact shape your role takes.
Get good at managing up. There will always be work that you can't do, or you can't do it as well as you like. There will always be very busy bosses, and you will always have to figure out how to get on the same page with them. This is a great skill to have.
Get good at talking about the impact of your work, especially if you're in a middle management role where your work and its impact are less directly visible.
Also, find a company that's the right fit for you at this point in time. We'll soon have a Leadership Confidential podcast episode about how to do that.
Managing in a downturn is draining and many leaders only get very little support right now but want to give a lot of support to their team members. Don't let all of this grind you down. Be mindful of your own capacity and limits. Don't overextend yourself and take care of yourself. Connect with other leaders, with your peers, either at your company or outside, and be the leader that you want to see in the world, or at least, you know, become it.
Towards a Sustainable Future
As the tech industry continues to evolve, so will the expectations and responsibilities of its leaders. Adapting to these changes requires that we commit to continuing to learn and adapt, deeply understand the unique challenges of our organizations, and are willing to embrace new leadership paradigms.
The discussion on what effective engineering management and leadership look like is more important than ever. If we embrace the complexity of this question and focus on the needs of tech businesses and humans, we can not just navigate the current industry changes with confidence and purpose, but also actively create a tech industry that is worth working in.
