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Managing people is a whole new skillset compared to coding.
Borrowing from The Making of A Manager by Julie Zhou, there are 3 core areas to management. Quoting from the book, these are:
Engineering management in particular brings exciting new territories to explore, where your impact grows through developing others and mastering skills you may have never encountered as an individual contributor.
In this getting started guide, we'll explore how to successfully navigate the transition from writing code to leading teams, and what it takes to thrive in engineering management today. Whether you're a senior developer contemplating the leap into management or an engineering manager looking to level up your skills, you're in the right place.
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The key responsibility of engineering management is straightforward, but not easy — you need to deliver innovative, sustainable software solutions that create real value. You aren’t doing it alone though, since part of your role is building the right team to achieve your organizational goals. And after getting the right people, you also need to motivate them! Sheesh.
To excel in this role, engineering managers need to make the jump from focusing on technical questions to people and organizational ones. We Are Tech Women sums it up well — your responsibilities shift from doing the work to guiding others in their work. It’s about supporting your team, making strategic decisions and keeping everyone on track.
Now let’s dive deeper into the 3Ps outlined above (with one special mention upfront about trust because we believe that to be of upmost importance).
At Multitudes, we believe the most important role of a great engineering manager is to establish trust in the team.
Trust is not an abstract concept; it's a tangible atmosphere where individuals feel secure and valued. In a high-trust team, there's a sense of psychological safety, open communication, and a shared commitment to the team's goals.
Google's Project Aristotle research into team effectiveness revealed that psychological safety, more than anything else, was the number one factor for improving team performance. The researchers found that individuals on teams with higher psychological safety were less likely to leave Google, they were more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they brought in more revenue, and they were rated as effective twice as often by executives.
Julie Zhou, author of The Making of a Manager, also argues that you know you’ve developed trust when:
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Now let’s dive into the 3Ps, inspired by The Making of A Manager by Julie Zhou with our examples tailored to engineering management.
Every great team needs a compelling "why". A clear purpose that energizes and aligns their work. This shared purpose becomes your team's North Star, influencing literally everything you do.
A powerful purpose is about the real impact your team creates in the world and the meaningful difference you make in users' lives. When teams deeply understand their why, they make better decisions and navigate challenges with confidence. Without this clarity, team members often pull in different directions or struggle to focus on what truly matters.
Picture a team building a healthcare scheduling platform:
True alignment comes from shared belief in the mission, not just following directions.
A leader's core responsibility is creating clarity around success and inspiring their team to achieve it together. Your team's purpose might be focused – like "help small businesses process payments in under a second" – or ambitious – like "make online education accessible to everyone." Whatever that purpose is, it should bleed into every aspect of your work.
When you deeply understand your team's mission, it naturally flows into your daily actions, from the way you set quarterly goals to how you run your standups. It shapes your team's priorities, guides individual growth conversations, and helps everyone make better decisions about what to build next.
The second critical element of leadership is focusing on your people. Common questions include: Do you have the right people? Are they set up to succeed? Are they motivated to achieve the results you need?
Without the right combination of capable, engaged people and a supportive environment, even the best product vision will remain just that — a vision.
Continuing the healthcare scheduling example:
Any of these situations can impact your team's ability to deliver reliable, user-friendly healthcare software.
Strong people leadership requires building genuine connections with your team members, understanding both their superpowers and growth areas and making thoughtful decisions about roles and responsibilities.
Sometimes this means having candid conversations about performance, making tough hiring decisions, or recognizing when someone might be better suited to a different team. But most often, it means coaching your people to reach their full potential while creating an environment where they feel empowered to do their best work.
The final piece is process — the way your team works together day-to-day.
Even with brilliant engineers and a crystal-clear purpose, teams need effective ways to collaborate. This means establishing clear expectations around how decisions are made, who owns what, and how work flows between team members.
Again with the healthcare scheduling example:
Process can feel bureaucratic. Many of us have dreamed of working in a process-free environment where we could just focus on shipping great code. But effective processes create clarity that helps teams move faster and work better together.
They're the foundation that enables sustainable, high-quality delivery.
People commonly refer to management as a ‘soft skill’. What does this actually mean? Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills and communication skills, as well as personality traits and attitudes.
There are 5 key skills we believe every engineering manager should have:
Hopefully this also reminds you of some of the best managers you’ve had!
Remember, building great teams isn't as simple as putting talented people together in a room. Even J. Richard Hackman, who spent four decades studying how professionals collaborate - from orchestra musicians creating harmony to pilots safely navigating the skies, said that making a team function well is harder than it looks. “Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have,” he says. “That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.”
The transition to engineering management brings significant changes to your day-to-day work. While your technical expertise remains valuable, your role shifts from directly building solutions to enabling others to succeed
Making the leap from developer to engineering manager brings one of the biggest mindset shifts of your career: learning to trade deep focus time for high availability.
"When you're in a management role, you need to prioritize high availability. For me, that meant that my day (and mind) became profoundly fragmented," shares Zeke Nierenberg, a former CTO who later transitioned back to an individual contributor role.
This hits home for many engineering managers. There's something deeply satisfying about spending hours solving a complex technical problem. But as a manager, your primary role shifts to enabling your team's success. This means:
While it's still valuable to stay technically involved, finding focus time becomes increasingly challenging as your team grows. The key is accepting that your impact now comes primarily through enabling others — a different but equally important way of contributing to your team's success.
Signs you may need to work on this:
If so, you should work on your availability and how well you clear the path for your team's work.
Beyond the loss of coding time, one of the biggest adjustments for new engineering managers is learning to have difficult conversations and providing consistent, real feedback. While technical decisions might feel straightforward for an experienced software engineer, people management requires a different set of stills that takes time to develop.
These moments range from performance reviews to impromptu feedback sessions, and from career discussions to personal challenges. What makes this especially complex is the broad spectrum of these interactions - some might be simple course corrections, while others can impact someone's career trajectory. And sometimes these conversations aren’t even about work:
“You might have someone closed off because they are mad at you or another person on the team; or you may have someone crying in your office because of something going on in their life that isn’t about work at all.” — highlighted by Tyler Jefford, Engineering Manager at Venmo.
Many new managers find themselves mentally drained after days filled with giving feedback and handling difficult conversations. It's one thing to notice areas for improvement, it's another to consistently and constructively communicate these observations to your team members. Feedback needs to be ongoing, not just reserved for formal performance reviews or critical situations.
While challenging, these human elements often become the most rewarding part of the role for those willing to embrace them. There's no perfect "management formula" because people are wonderfully complex — and that's what makes the role uniquely engaging.
Signs you may need to work on this:
In this case, it's time to get better at giving clear and kind feedback to the people you work with, so you can improve your skills and be able to coach others on your team on this skill too.
As you transition into management, you'll inevitably have less time to sharpen your technical skills. When you're a new manager with limited hours each week for learning, it's tough to carve out significant time for diving deep into technical topics.
Jennifer Fu from Codementor points out that while some engineering managers stay hands-on, many step back from coding — as you’re spending more time on people management tasks like 1:1s, meetings with product teams, and interviews. For engineers who are used to spending most of their time coding, this shift can be a real challenge.
But here's the thing - as an engineering manager, your role is to stay on top of the big picture tech trends in your industry and grasp the pros and cons of various solutions. You should be able to jump into the codebase and contribute when needed, but you won't have the bandwidth to get hands-on with every shiny new framework or tool your team is excited about.
Microsoft actually conducted an empirical study on what makes for a great engineering manager and found that focusing too much on technical excellence can actually harm managers effectiveness by taking them away from crucial people management skills.
Signs you may need to work on this:
Something that can help with this is choosing coding tasks that aren't critical path – the tech debt or improvement work that needs to be done sometime, but that doesn't have to be done on a strict timeline like feature work.
As individuals transition into management roles, they become responsible for team performance. One of the key enablers of driving performance are through metrics. Among the recognized frameworks utilized for measuring engineering team performance are DORA metrics, SPACE (Satisfaction, Performance, Activity, Communication, and Efficiency) framework, and the Developer Experience (DevEx) framework.
Each framework presents its own lens through which engineering team performance can be viewed:
We’ve written in-depth our perspective on metrics here, and our approach to measurement here.
Leading voices in engineering often share valuable perspectives on software engineering management. Two leaders whose approaches we like include:
Top engineering manager books:
Some other great management books we’re fans of:
Multitudes help engineering managers be at their best. Multitudes integrates with your existing development tools, such as GitHub and Jira, to provide insights into your team's productivity and collaboration patterns.
With Multitudes, you can:
Our clients ship 25% faster without sacrificing code quality.
Ready to unlock happier, higher-performing teams?
