From Side Quests to Scrum Sprints: An Engineering Manager’s Odyssey

Introduction

Hi! I’m Lorraine, and I’ve been an Engineering Manager for over a year now. I worked for nine years in the Financial Services industry as a backend developer before deciding to transition to the people management path. In order to share my adventures (and misadventures) as an individual contributor transitioning to a management role, I thought about a good analogy I could use. Outside of work, an activity I really enjoy is gaming. That’s it! I will draw some concepts from RPGs (Role-Playing Games), a genre I've played a lot.

Cue video game intro music

Imagine dungeons and dragons... but replace it with deadlines and deliverables. That’s how my transition to Engineering Manager felt: a thrilling quest filled with unexpected twists and epic boss battles (not literally, thankfully!) This is my journey about how I assembled my party, tackled challenges, and leveled up my leadership skills.

Leveling Up: Transitioning to Management Career Path

One realization I had is this: being an Engineering Manager is not merely a step up or the 'next level.' It’s a career change. Moreover, I find myself starting my managerial career in a new company and country respectively. It’s akin to embarking on a new game in hardcore mode. However, unlike in games, real life doesn’t offer tips, tutorials, or teach you about the controls. Without warning, my main quest is already laid out: Survive your first year as a manager. (panic intensifies) What now?

To be focused on the main quest, I started by asking myself the following: (1) Why do I want to be a manager? (2) What do I want to achieve? (3) How will I do it?

• Why do I want to be a manager? Personally, I like helping people. I feel most fulfilled when I see my team succeed with my help. I want to become a manager because I believe that I can have a multiplier effect—that my team will be able to achieve greater feats.
• What do I want to achieve? My goals as a manager revolve around my personal values: Continuous learning, Commitment, and Trust. I want to ensure that my team: 1) has the opportunity to learn; 2) realizes that the work they do adds business value; and 3) feels that they are being taken care of.
• How will I do it? To become an effective Engineering Manager, I also need to level up my skills. Think of it like strengthening your character in a game: I have to allocate skill points in leadership, communication, and technical knowledge. I continuously equip myself with books to get inspiration from. I constantly listen to podcasts in a quest for knowledge in the areas of leadership.

Churning Leadership: Assembling and Building a High-Performance Team

Some RPGs allow players to team up with each other and form a party. Everyone has a common goal, be it slaying monsters, crawling dungeons, or battling other players. My team is composed of diverse talents, each with their own skill sets, experiences, and cultural backgrounds. I need to know their strengths because I have to delegate and assign specific people to tackle different challenges. For instance, there’s a Warrior who goes in the front lines to handle incidents, a Bard who inspires other members and brings up the morale, a Fighter who is adept in various areas and can take on any task (full-stack developer), a Wizard who is wise and can guide the team in system designs, and a Ranger who can detect bugs from miles away and vanquish them.

In addition, it’s not just about individual skills; it's about teamwork. I have to foster open communication and encourage collaboration and sharing of knowledge so that everyone is well-coordinated as we face dungeon bosses like scope creeps, organizational changes, burnout, legacy code, unrealistic deadlines, language barriers, and more. This article dives into the challenges of leading a multicultural engineering team. It will come in handy when battling cultural differences.

Accomplishments and Learnings

Despite challenges, I am proud to say that one of my proudest achievements was assembling a full-stack team and successfully launching our Card Issuing product. Here are some of the “hidden treasures” that I discovered along the way:

1. Meetings are a necessary evil: As an IC, I dreaded meetings because they broke my “in the zone” state. As a Manager, my calendar is filled with meetings leaving me a few small slots for focus time. Meetings can be energy-draining, but I accepted it as part of my job. Besides, it’s an opportunity to connect with people which is especially important for hybrid work
2. Stop doing IC work: I fell into one of the major pitfalls of entry-level engineering managers: I tried to pick up development tasks. At first, I thought that this was okay since I wanted to understand the codebase. I ended up asking one of my team members to cover the task for me because I could not finish on time. Instead of helping, I became a bottleneck! As a manager, I learned that the best use of my time is doing management work and not robbing my team of their chance to learn.
3. Delegation is key: I can’t do everything on my own. I have let go of some control and trust in my team. This will help them have a greater sense of ownership.
4. Don’t give orders, inspire: I must not micromanage. No one wants a helicopter boss. If I just tell them what to do, they won’t discover things on their own. They won’t be able to make their own mistakes. This kind of behavior inhibits innovation. It doesn’t mean I have to leave them alone, I still need to guide and set them up for success.
5. There are good and bad days: It will not always be sunshine and rainbows. I need to manage myself when I am feeling low.

Closing Thoughts

I must admit, there are multiple times that I second-doubted myself and wanted to go back to being an IC. I am fortunate to belong to this company and have a manager who guided me and a team that supported me.

Overcoming the first year of management is just the first step of many. There might be more perils along the way, but I am also leveling up by continuously learning, adapting, and growing.

My adventure continues.

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