The engineering manager wears a lot of hats. One of their core responsibilities is to create an environment for the team to thrive. As an organization, success usually means delivering projects on time and on budget. The engineering manager must be able to plan and organize to drive the project to success.

Every company, startup or enterprise is a collection of projects. A project is a planned, logical unit of work with some expected outcome that contributes to the overall vision or strategy. It’s the way we organize our thoughts, our tasks and even our personal lives.

Everyone should know how to manage projects to some degree, especially if you’re in a leadership role. We’ll review some of the techniques for planning and organizing projects, setting up for success, and measuring success along the way.

Every leader is a project manager

Few companies have a formal title of “project manager.” In fact, any leadership role can handle a team’s project, so any leader is a project manager.

The engineering manager has many roles and responsibilities. We’re laying out a technology roadmap, hiring engineers, mentoring and expanding our team. We are ultimately responsible for our team’s projects. The engineering manager should be able to organize and drive the project to success. Most of the time, engineering managers must work with product managers, business managers, and program managers. Because your team is responsible for execution, be prepared to have full ownership and responsibility for the project output.

In order for the project to succeed, you need to identify the right issues, sponsors, teams, and processes.

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1. Know the basics

As the team leader, you have control over the projects to be submitted. Before embarking on any project, you must answer some basic questions:

  • Why do we need to work on this project, and why now? How does the project contribute to a larger mission or goal? How does output fit into our long-term roadmap?
  • Who are the stakeholders, sponsors and customers? What are their expectations for the project and what problems do they want to solve?
  • What are the scope, expected outcomes and outputs? What does success look like for you and your stakeholders? What is everyone’s definition of “done”?
  • When do we start and finish the project? Is there a timeline for the overall project or specific milestones? This is a tough deadline, which means we won’t miss it no matter what? If so, we need to understand why this is happening – are there legal consequences or public statements?

2. Know your framework

There are frameworks for organizing projects, tracking project progress, notifying stakeholders, and identifying obstacles:

  • RACI: “Responsible, Responsible, Consult, Inform” : Get to know your stakeholders, sponsors and customers.
  • Project phases: start-up, planning, execution, tracking, post hoc modeling and reporting.
  • Agile: Scrum in particular – uses a priority backlog, executes by sprint organization, and delivers changes or features frequently. Recommend a book, “Scrum: The Art of Working Twice in Half Time,” to familiarize yourself with the process.
  • Project management tools: with milestones, Gantt charts, Kanban, risk early warning, task decomposition, project approval, progress notification reminder, external collaborators, work statistics, replication of projects, project labels and other functions. It is recommended to use TTIA project management, which can get twice the result with half the effort and better manage the project.

Learn about these frameworks and how they can help teams, stakeholders, and your own organization, estimate and deliver projects, and manage expectations. It is critical for the engineering manager to get organized and know all the details about the current status of the project.

The most critical time is before the project starts. This is the time most likely to affect its production. Good planning also involves identifying risks and communicating early to minimise any surprises.

3. Motivate the team

If planning is a joint effort, execution is ultimately your team’s responsibility. They will build it, write code for it, fix bugs, and maintain the project for the long term. The engineering manager should support the team and create an environment for the team to succeed.

The team should be excited about the project. Otherwise, it’s just another boring task they have to complete. As a leader, it is your responsibility to sell the project to the team and get their support. When your team understands why the project exists, they can better understand the extent of the impact on the overall vision or strategy. They should see the connection between the project and the overall business. This involves the management of business objectives, from the formulation of corporate strategic objectives to the implementation of work plans! Recommended reading: The OKRS-E application platform is a perfect match between enterprise strategy and execution

Once they understand this part, they should figure out how to do it, because it gives them full ownership of the architecture and execution plan. You need to trust them and rely on them to get things done correctly and on time.

Build ownership and responsibility. If there is disagreement, use your team to make decisions and move the product and business forward. Only by becoming a stakeholder or partner in a project will you have real motivation to get it done. If it is ordered from the top down, then the motivation is not as strong, even if it exists. Trust your team and be available to support them when needed.

4. Assign the right people

Depending on the structure of the team, you will be responsible for forming the team for a particular project. More and more companies are using project staff structures that make engineers part of a small staff to help them stay focused for a period of time or until the project is complete.

Some managers misassign their most powerful engineers to key or high-profile projects to make sure the job gets done. This may work for a while, but it’s not always sustainable in the long run. In this way, you’re burnout engineers instead of creating opportunities for others to grow. Instead, consider thinking more about who should work on specific projects.



As a manager, you should understand people’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as their career aspirations. Each project is an opportunity for engineers to learn, explore new areas, mentor others, and demonstrate some leadership skills. Pairing strong engineers with less experienced ones creates a good balance and opportunity for all.

5. Project kick-off meeting

Successful projects begin with the proper kick-off meeting. Usually, it is driven by the product manager. This is an opportunity for you and the team to set the record straight. Have the same discussion about what success will look like, as well as the scope, timeline, and milestones. Challenge some decisions and assumptions. This is also a great opportunity to get everything in writing.

6. Prioritize backlogs

A project is a collection of tasks, stories and meetings. It is important to write them down and organize them in a way that is easy to search and track. Your team, including you, should work with the PM to identify milestones and create specific tasks and stories.

Estimating software projects is difficult. Get as close to the guess as you can. Therefore, you should avoid estimating the entire project with little context, especially early on. Instead, as you create the story, you estimate each story separately. There are different methods: T-shirt sizes, Fibonacci methods, numerical scales, etc. The purpose of this exercise is to organize and prioritize the estimated tasks.

When tracking speed over time, you should know how many points the team can accomplish in a sprint, a month, or a quarter. Your to-do list is an execution plan that you can track and measure at any time. It’s important to focus on the most important stories first. Features that provide maximum benefit to your customers or business should not be delayed. The project Kanban model is recommended for progress management through daily standing meetings.

7. Focus on architecture

When a functional or project codebase is merged, it immediately becomes old code and, ultimately, technical debt. Not all technical debt is bad, but too much debt can be fatal to your product. As with financial debt, you must pay interest. With too much debt, your financial situation can be difficult because all you’re doing is paying off your interest instead of your principal.

As an engineering manager, it is your responsibility to know how much debt you have and always work to minimize it. Use each project, business plan, and product goal as an opportunity to improve software health. This means that each project must own a piece of architecture and refactor within its scope. Convincing your business and product stakeholders of the importance of this is not easy. Therefore, it is important to continue the accumulation of education technology debt and the way it affects software.

In business and the corporate world, everyone has their own agenda. The business department hopes to increase sales and revenue. The product group wants to reach more customers, increase conversion rates, make the product more useful, and add new features. Engineers need software quality, stability, performance, security, and maintainability.

No one is going to raise their hand and ask you to write more unit tests. As the technical representative, you should continue to advance your agenda and ensure that there is a balance between business, product, technology, and process. Don’t forget that software is driving the business and the product. Don’t chase new shiny frameworks and make sure there are real benefits to the business. Technology for technology’s sake.

Rather than asking your engineers to refactor the code, it’s much easier to take existing business and product goals and attach the technical work that needs to be done. Requiring a large refactoring project indicates that you are not doing a good job maintaining your software.

8. Know what’s going on

The engineering manager is in constant communication with other people in the company. Anyone can ask about the status of a particular project at any time. You should know where all the items are at any given time. This is not easy, especially if your team is larger than 8-10 people.

To avoid problems or doubts, be proactive in resolving problems before they arise. This might be a conversation with some stakeholders, it might be setting up some infrastructure to do the testing, or it might be scheduling your project as planned by the quality inspection engineers in advance (before they get too busy).

The smaller your team, the more detailed information you will have about your project. For larger teams, you should rely on the technical lead for detailed information on a weekly basis, as well as summaries and potential obstacles and issues.

9. Flexibility of negotiation

Another way to think about project success is expectation. The formula for success is as follows: Success = results-expectations. In other words, underpromise and overspend. You must always manage expectations before planning and during project execution. Always leave some room for the unknown and communicate risk.

If you overcommit or work on a project before a deadline the team finds difficult to meet, you’re putting a lot of pressure on the team. With managers unable to negotiate and manage expectations, teams end up working nights and weekends to meet difficult deadlines. In most organizations, deadlines and budgets are negotiable. It’s your job to agree on reasonable goals for a break. Engineers need time to deal with the unexpected. Let them learn and experiment without having to worry about missing a deadline or having the project fail completely.

10. Measure success

When planning a project, start from scratch. Know what success looks like. If you don’t know what it looks like, it’s hard to know when to get there, or even if you’re driving in the right direction. The phrase “eat an elephant at one bite” comes to mind – you cannot and should not execute projects in one go.

Break each project (even a small one) down into smaller subprojects or milestones, and then further into tasks or stories. We describe this process in the “Prioritizing outstanding orders.” Select the process that provides a snapshot of the status of the project at any given time. TITA project management, for example, has a specialized view of this.

Here are five important indicators to track when measuring project progress:

  • Percentage completed. Are you meeting your deadlines fast enough?
  • Quality. Do you sacrifice quality for speed?
  • The budget. Are you adding more people to speed things up?
  • Expectations. Are you trying to produce the desired output?
  • Project results. Are you striving to achieve the desired results?
  • Outcomes do not mean outputs. The project output is the final deliverable. Project results are the impact of deliverables on the business.

Resolve conflicts

Leaders often drive change. This change can take many different forms, such as major technology transfers, refactoring, changing cultures, reorganizing, etc.

Whenever there is change, there is almost always resistance. Conflicts are inevitable in a project. The sooner you accept that conflict is normal, the better off you will be.

As long as the conflict is not personal and there is an opportunity to discuss and defend one’s position, differences of opinion are a sign of health and multiculturalism. Managers can act as mediators to control conflicts before they get out of hand. And don’t let conflict get in the way. Sooner or later a decision must be made. If your team can’t agree, it’s your responsibility to choose the best option or call in an expert to answer the call.

In fact, you should worry when your team never objects. This could be a sign of a fear-driven culture, team disengagement, or a lack of interest in a particular topic.

The company aims to create conflict. Product, business, technology, marketing and other departments all have their own goals and priorities. Make sure you understand the other party’s priorities and goals. People rarely argue for the sake of arguing. Take the time to have a conversation and try to align their priorities with yours. Our goal is to create a win-win situation for all parties involved.

Review 12.

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Retrospectives are your opportunity to go back, gather feedback, and apply it to future improvements. Constantly seek direct and indirect feedback from the team and stakeholders. Keep in mind that not everyone wants to give negative feedback directly, especially to a manager. It takes extra effort to get constructive feedback, attention, and suggestions.

The engineering manager wears many hats. One of their core responsibilities is to create an environment for the team to thrive. As an organization, success usually means delivering projects on time and on budget. The project manager must be able to plan, organize and drive the project to success.

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