The Engineering Leader

Chapter 6. Defining and Adapting Your Role

Congratulations, you’re a manager. But wait! What even is your job now? What are you responsible for? What do you do? You’ve read The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier (O’Reilly)¹ and scheduled a bunch of 1:1s, and maybe you have some ideas about what needs to be different for the team to do better.

It’s easy to get caught up in the activities of management: the meetings, the escalations, the bureaucracies. But it’s not always clear what these are meant to accomplish. This can lead to believing you’re a good manager because you do all the activities but being unclear on how to progress because you’re focused on tasks rather than outcomes.

This chapter is not about the tasks associated with being a manager. This is about the outcomes managers need to drive to be effective. You can use this information to manage down, making sure you drive the outcomes your team needs, and you can use this information to manage up, ensuring you get what you need to be successful.

This is an opportunity to think about what you should be doing now so that you’re doing something else six months from now. What does success look like, and how do you know when you have achieved it? We’ll come back to this in Chapter 14.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the components of managing a team, how to decide what to prioritize, and how to ensure that your job changes regularly.

The Components of Management

Often when we talk about managing people, it’s synonymous with ...