Transitioning from a software engineer to a management role

Software engineers who want to be good at leading engineering can use everyday opportunities to practice management. Peter Gillard-Moss gave a talk at QCon London, where he shared his experiences of becoming a manager and provided tips and ideas for engineers looking to become managers.

Gillard-Moss mentioned that he wanted to take on a management position because he believed his technical background gave him the knowledge to lead and make decisions on behalf of the team. It was a belief shared by those who put him in the manager’s position, he explained:

Although I wanted to lead, I was reluctant to manage. Ultimately, actual management responsibility meant I had difficulty fulfilling these roles.

Looking back, Gillard-Moss said it was mainly due to bad managers. He also had good managers, but these managers were very unconventional and positioned themselves more as leaders than managers. They were no longer hands-off and focused more on giving me directions, and it was his job to untangle the day-to-day responsibilities, as Gillard-Moss explained:

I had the freedom to make technical decisions, but it didn’t help me grow as a manager. As a result, I struggled with the non-technical aspects of working with people, lacked confidence in my role, and withdrew into a role as a senior individual technical specialist.

Gillard-Moss suggested that engineers who want to be good at leading engineering should practice on a small scale. Engineers have opportunities to practice management every day, he said. You don’t need authority. In fact, many engineers who become engineering managers are often noticed because they show glimpses of management within their teams, as he explained:

It really could be as simple as choosing an epic and taking responsibility for it from start to finish. Organizing the team to deliver it effectively, ensuring clear communication, and working to remove obstacles so the rest of the team can stay focused. Or it could be running a team ritual and working to make it worthwhile and productive.

If you have a good manager, you’ll probably realize they’re already giving you these kinds of opportunities and enabling you, Gillard-Moss said.

To serve as role models, engineering leaders must live up to the standards they want to set. Your team is watching your every move, Gillard-Moss said. The behavior you expect from engineers you must first demonstrate:

If you say quality is important, but every time you have to make a difficult trade-off, you are sacrificing quality. Or you say you want to assert independence, but you get involved in every decision. Then you are not a role model.

As an engineering leader, I don’t have to know every technical decision, be an expert in every framework we use, or have complex knowledge of code organization for the team to find the answer, Gillard-Moss said. But the team did, he explained:

The value of my experience as an engineer is that I know when someone’s idea is promising and I should support it. Or when another engineer disagrees, I understand where they’re coming from. And when the team shows me what it looks like, whether in code or in a diagram, I connect with what they think about it and what they think about it.

That doesn’t mean you can be ignorant, Gillard-Moss said. You need to learn from and listen to your teams because they will naturally keep up with the changes. As an engineering leader, you can nurture and encourage this. Combine that with visiting the gemba and observing the teams doing the real work and you’ll pick it up by osmosis, concluded Gillard-Moss.

InfoQ interviewed Peter Gillard-Moss about managing and leading engineering teams.

InfoQ: What challenges did you face when you became a manager?

Peter Gillard-Moss: I had a strong aversion to the word manager and the idea of ​​management. Much of this was due to ignorance. I didn’t know what good management looked like or what it meant. And the ideas I had about it were mostly negative. Authority, approval, inspection, delegation and giving difficult feedback. I also associated many of these skills with project management and knew that they were not in my blood.

It took me a while to learn what good management was and why it was important. And why leadership and management are two sides of a coin, not a dichotomy.

InfoQ: How can engineering leaders act as engineering stakeholders?

Gillard-Moss: You must be a stakeholder of engineering and engineers when representing. This is not the same as “speaking for.”

Your role is to present the stakeholders’ perspectives and ensure that their needs and concerns are taken into account in the decision-making process. When making difficult decisions, it’s important to include an engineering perspective and help people from other disciplines understand the tradeoffs that need to be made. Negotiate with other stakeholders so we can make the best decision for the organization, its customers and employees.