Are you ready to manage other managers?
2 min read
You have now been managing engineers for two years as a frontline manager. Your team is expanding. It is time to decide whether you are ready to have another manager reporting to you or request your manager to create a sister team.
Sometimes, just because you can, does not mean you should. If you have this option staring at you, you should make the decision carefully.
Managing managers is inevitable
Over time teams grow and you will have to manage other managers. Rushing into it without being prepared will cause churn, stress and may impact your longterm growth.
The high level changes to get comfortable with
- Operating with less information
- Interpolating details from vague signals
- Developing a strong sense of intuitions
- Communication loss
- Having repeatable framework for complex scenarios
A non exhaustive checklist to evaluate readiness
If you have experienced these and have a repeatable framework most of these, you will likely be ready.
Project Execution
- Took major 1 year long project from idea to launch
- Had a failed project that you had to shut down
- Helped an idea initiated by your engineer to gain traction within the larger organization outside of your team
- Created and convinced senior management to start a new charter
- Aware and actively participate in providing suggestions for all your existing sister teams under your manager
- Work with other functions like project, program, design. Anyone beyond just engineers.
- Experience working with IC engineers two levels above your current level
- Robust project management skills with other team dependencies
People Management
- Your current team has at-least 2 tech leads and you are partially redundant
- Have completed candidate sell calls and have close to 70% success rate
- Dealt with a performance issue either to improve or manage out
- Promoted 2+ engineers to the equivalent of your current level or above
- Dealt with quick attrition of your most critical talent
- Pivoted the team to a different charter
- Turned around low morale of the team
- Comfortable bootstrapping a new team culture
- Resolved interpersonal issues between team members