Engineering Manager Guide

Being a technical lead is hard, and your job as a manager is to amplify your teammates. I’ve been managing teams for the last seven years, and throughout this time, I have collected many mistakes (and learnings from them doh!), which might be helpful for other engineers who are about to start leading teams.

As a software engineer, you were never taught the subtle art of building a team or leading people. As if this isn’t enough, all your team members tend to be incredibly smart, analytical, opinionated and ambitious. You know, the standard engineering types.

I’d like to fix this and help you become a good manager, a good leader. I have experience growing from zero to multiple cross-functional teams working as one big well-oiled development machine. Most of the stuff in the series comes from my personal encounters with the issues described.

Working with people from different fields is an extremely rewarding experience, but it also means that you’ll have to deal with different expectations, language, ways of thinking and communication styles from all around the world.

All of the sections combined are about 50’000 words. Hope you enjoy it.

📖 Table of Contents

• 0️⃣ What does a CTO actually do?
• 1️⃣ Becoming CTO the first time
• 2️⃣ How to build remote teams properly
• 3️⃣ Self-Organizing Teams
• 4️⃣ Embracing Hacker Culture
• 5️⃣ How to run efficient meetings with engineers
• 6️⃣ Growing your interns
• 7️⃣ Dealing with technical debt
• 8️⃣ Proper Estimations
• 9️⃣ Proper Documentation
• 1️⃣0️⃣ Being a good mentor
• 1️⃣1️⃣ Managing difficult engineers

Scaling anything related to people resources is quite fun once you get the hang of it. It’s finding the right talent, making sure they stay, making sure they are challenged and not bored, and ensuring the teams stay productive and on the right course. Sounds like quite a challenge. It is, but with the tools that I offer in this guide, you’ll be able to manage software developers easily.

This series was made for technical managers and future CTOs to grow the company by empowering & enabling their teammates.