eng mgmt ep7: Am I a good manager?

This is episode 7 of my series on being an Engineering Manager (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). How do you know if you’re a good manager, and what metrics should you use to grade yourself?

Hopefully you work in a goal-driven organization, and you have been setting aggressive goals for yourself and your team, and delivering on them for the business. Success! Does that mean you’re a good manager? Maybe!

Management = Long arcs

As you move up the levels of an organization, your impact becomes larger, but so too does the time it takes to see that impact happen. As a manager, you need to design things well: set goals, define technical objectives, hire a great team. But, you won’t know if you did those well for several months or even years. That’s exciting — and scary. You don’t know if the actions you are taking today are correct, and you won’t for many moons.

2,500 years later, these engineering managers can prove they led their teams well. Photo by Puk Patrick on Unsplash

Since all humans learn by trial and error, and management arcs are long, your learning will take time. The cycle time to see all of your errors is months or years. They say “experience matters”, and this is why: great managers make many mistakes across many years, and learn from them.

That last part is important: it’s not just doing the job for months and years — you also need to learn from your experiences. “Deliberate…