Engineering Manager Responsibilities

In this lesson, we talk about understanding incentives, especially your manager’s, as a key to navigating your career and collaborating effectively. By assuming people act in their own self-interest, we better understand how managers operate and how to work with them.

• We frame a “model of the world” where we assume people act selfishly, helping us predict behavior and align with our manager’s incentives.
• We note that understanding how an engineering manager is evaluated allows us to help them look good—and in doing so, we benefit too.
• We highlight that the EM role is challenging: they’re responsible for the team’s impact without writing code themselves, focusing instead on empowering and unblocking engineers.
• We clarify that growing engineers is only part of the role—EMs also handle hiring, firing, and performance reviews; sometimes their job is not to help us grow but to manage us out if needed.
• We describe additional responsibilities like removing cross-team blockers, resolving interpersonal issues, and creating team “synergy,” which includes a wide range of people- and process-related challenges.