Lots of posts about EM interviewing which is great but I have a more pragmatic question. For those of you at tier 1/2 tech as EMs what are your actual responsibilities? What skillets are most important for success? I've been an EM for a bit over a year (not at Groupon) but am at a smaller company. * I have 6 direct reports * Focus on recruiting, career growth of reports * Still contribute code but < 20% time at the moment. * Budget not in my control * Limited interaction with product or design since my team is more on the tooling/infrastructure side of things If I were trying to guide my career toward success at say Twitter/Reddit/Stripe/Square/etc on which part of my current delta should I focus on? Any EM insight appreciated. YOE: 13 TC: 240
XFN relationships, Shipping the product on time fully tested, Recruiting, Unblocking the team, Blocking the shit that get thrown at us, Predicting headcount needs, Growing Engineers and finding them opportunities, Controlling scope creep, KPIs, Quarterly OKRs, Strive to keep the leadership and the team happy, work to be DEI friendly, set the culture at the team level, Try to improve WLB, 1-1s is what I focus on for the most part. I think you can cut down on writing code and use that time to coach the team and make their lives better. Coding at an EM level is not a need at most companies. You should absolutely be technical though and understand wth is going on.
Great points. I guess I knew that code writing would end at some point but I'm probably too hesitant to give it up.
- Team career growth and skill development. Being effective here is #1 priority for me. There needs to be an incredibly clear path for each person on your team to grow and you need to be able to create opportunities that both align with the business needs and those plans. The more you invest in your team, the happier they’ll be, the faster they’ll grow, and the more value you can help deliver with your team. - Technical focus: generally I’m not an advocate of EMs coding. They should of course have the ability to and be highly technical, but coding is not the best use their capacity. A lot of time should be spent deep diving into the operational dashboards, metrics, designs, and developing a level of technical understanding of the system/service/product that a senior SDE would have. - since you’re infra, you should be focusing a lot of energy in developing a plan to optimize and scale your services in the near term, and 5 years from now. Be constantly evaluating how to save cost, drive performance improvements, and ensuring you can meet the demand of the business as it grows. - you have to be constantly focusing on the relationships with partner teams, and stakeholders. Develop clear lines of communication so that there’s transparency into the decisions your team makes, and so that you develop that necessary trust. Additionally, it allows you to always be in the know, and hopefully never caught off guard by external decisions that could impact your team. - project and roadmap planning is time consuming but critical to ensuring you’re optimizing your team’s capacity, and delivering the right value back to the business. Never let this data get stale and always seek feedback from others to ensure you’re headed down the right path. - status updates, MBR, QBR, etc.. prep. These are time consuming but don’t underestimate the value in being apart of these meetings and showcasing the impact from the hard work your team has done. Call people out on your team by name and elevate them above yourself. Their success is a reflection of you being a good leader and others will know that. - tons of other miscellaneous things, but these high level things came to mind.
Can't agree more. This is a brilliant write-up.
Excellent writup Snap. I really appreciate this and have broken these points up into a document that I intend to use as a frequent direction check.
Cross functional is the most important part as you move up.