What Is Your Purpose as an Engineering Manager?
- Marko Belusic
- Jan 19
- 3 min read
Updated: Jan 19
As engineering managers, we're not just technical leaders; we're architects of team success, cultivating environments where excellence becomes the norm rather than the exception.
An engineering manager’s primary purpose is to create an environment where the team can consistently deliver valuable, reliable software that meets business goals.
This blog explores three fundamental pillars that form the foundation of successful engineering management: Consistency, Value, and Reliability. These principles, when properly implemented, create a framework that enables teams to thrive and consistently deliver outstanding results.
1. Consistency
Definition: Consistency is the ability to deliver outcomes predictably over time without fluctuations in quality, speed, or morale. It reflects a team’s ability to sustain its performance and reliably meet commitments.
Principles for Achieving Consistency:
Clear Processes:
Define and document workflows: code reviews, deployments, incident resolution, feature rollout strategies, sprint planning, testing protocols.
Regularly review and improve workflows to address evolving team needs.
Standardize onboarding processes to ensure consistency for new team members.
Create checklists for critical tasks to prevent errors.
Define the "Definition of Done" or acceptance criteria for tasks to ensure everyone knows when a task is complete.
Assign clear ownership to each process step to avoid confusion and ensure accountability.
Meticulous Planning:
Accurately estimate team capacity and include buffer time for unforeseen tasks.
Define clear sprint and project goals with measurable outcomes.
Include risk assessment and mitigation strategies in planning processes.
Utilize measurable metrics for team velocity, quality, and throughput to detect anomalies early.
Ensure clear communication of the team’s progress, challenges, and needs to upper management and other departments to maintain trust and alignment across the organization.
Focus on Team Health:
Encourage sustainable work hours to prevent burnout.
Foster psychological safety, where team members feel comfortable sharing concerns or ideas.
Enable team members to grow their careers and reach the next level of expertise and responsibility.
Celebrate team achievements to maintain morale.
2. Value
Definition: Value means delivering software that aligns with and contributes to the organization’s business goals while addressing real customer needs. It’s not just about features; it’s about impact.
Principles for Delivering Value:
Understand Business Goals:
Ensure the team understands the "why" behind their work.
Use business metrics to measure the impact of software.
Align team goals with quarterly or annual company objectives.
Actively collaborate with stakeholders, including product managers and design teams, to refine priorities and align engineering efforts with business objectives.
Customer Focus:
Measure success through KPIs like customer satisfaction or retention rates.
Use validation and feedback loops, such as releasing MVPs and A/B testing, to ensure value assumptions are correct.
Analyze support tickets to identify recurring pain points.
Prioritization:
Use frameworks like RICE to prioritize features that maximize impact.
Reduce work on features that don’t directly impact the customer or business goals.
Make sure to continuously re-prioritize to ensure it is not treated as a one-time exercise.
Embrace lean principles to deliver value faster.
3. Reliability
Definition: Reliability means delivering software that performs as expected under all anticipated conditions. It encompasses functional correctness, uptime, scalability, security, and maintainability.
Principles for Ensuring Reliability:
Robust Engineering Practices:
Use automated testing (unit, integration, and end-to-end tests).
Follow coding standards and perform thorough code reviews.
Actively address and manage technical debt to prevent long-term system degradation and ensure codebase health.
Regularly perform incident post-mortems to prevent recurring issues.
Maintain clear runbooks for handling common incidents.
Infrastructure Resilience:
Monitor system health (e.g., latency, errors) using reliable monitoring tools, and respond to incidents swiftly.
Design for scalability, fault tolerance, and secure operations.
Establish and regularly test disaster recovery plans to ensure business continuity during unexpected events or system failures.
Conduct regular load testing to identify potential issues.
Make sure to have strong observability—ensuring deep visibility (metrics, logs, traces) into how systems behave in production.
Security:
Proactively address security vulnerabilities through audits and threat modeling.
Ensure data privacy and compliance with industry standards.
Conduct regular security training for team members.
Final Thoughts
As an engineering manager, your success lies in fostering a culture where these three pillars thrive. Stay committed to these principles, but remain flexible in how you implement them based on your team's unique needs and circumstances. If you are interested to read about engineering manager performance from a different perspective, check out my previous blog “How to Measure the Output of an Engineering Manager”.