I’ve been an engineering manager for about a month. Everything I think I know about this job comes from books, talks, and watching other managers. Not from doing it.
That’s an uncomfortable thing to write. But it’s accurate, and I’d rather be honest about where I’m starting than write a post that performs experience I don’t have.
I’ve had a personal north star for a while that’s shaped why I wanted this role in the first place:
Build systems that people can trust, environments where engineers can thrive, and a life where professional ambition and family commitment strengthen rather than compete with each other.
The first part is engineering. The second is leadership. The third is the part most people leave out — the whole-life version of the question. I’m a father of two, a husband, a son, an amateur athlete, and someone who needs people around him to function well. I came into this role wanting all three parts of that north star, not just the first two. That shapes what I think good management looks like, and what I’m trying not to trade away to get there.
Simon Sinek has a line that fits: “Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.” Most of what I’ve read suggests the difficulty of management lives exactly in that gap: between the authority the role gives you and the genuine care it requires.
This post is me thinking out loud before I have real data. Consider it a baseline. I’m curious whether the things I’m anticipating are the things that actually matter.
The shift I’m already feeling #
I spent years as an engineer. Output was visible. Write good code, solve hard problems, ship things. Your competence is attributable. You can point to it.
A month in, I’m already noticing that’s not how this works. My job now is to make other people effective — and when that goes well, it probably won’t look like it came from me. The instinct to jump in and fix things is still there. I’m trying to learn when to resist it.
Everything I’ve read suggests this is the central tension of the transition: you got the job because of what you could do yourself, but doing it yourself is now mostly the wrong move.
What I’m thinking about: 1:1s #
I’ve started weekly 1:1s with everyone on the team. I think they’re going to be valuable. I’m not yet sure I’m running them well.
The advice I’ve absorbed is consistent: let them set the agenda, don’t make it a status update, ask open questions, listen more than you talk. I’m trying to do this. A few weeks in, I’m still calibrating.
Sinek’s idea of the circle of safety is the thing I find most compelling here. The premise is that people only do their best work when they feel safe enough to be honest — to say something isn’t working, to admit they’re stuck, to raise a problem before it’s a crisis. That safety isn’t created by policy. It accumulates through consistent behaviour, and the manager has to go first: be vulnerable, admit uncertainty, not react badly to bad news.
The question I don’t know how to answer yet: how long does that actually take to build? And how do you know if you’ve built it, versus if people are just being polite?
What I’m anticipating will be hard: feedback #
I haven’t had to deliver many hard conversations yet. But I’ve thought about this a lot, because everything I’ve read says it’s where new managers most commonly go wrong.
The theory sounds manageable: be specific, be timely, separate observation from judgement. In practice, I suspect I’m going to soften things I shouldn’t soften. The obvious cases will probably be fine. When something is clearly serious, the stakes create enough clarity. The medium-sized things worry me more. Patterns that aren’t critical yet but probably will be. Feedback that’s important but easy to defer because it’s not urgent.
I’ve seen what deferred feedback does. Not as a manager, but as an engineer on the receiving end of it. It compounds. By the time you hear it, it’s too late to course-correct gracefully.
I want to treat that debt seriously. I don’t know yet if I will.
What I think I believe: protecting people’s focus #
One conviction I’m coming in with is that protecting focus is a core part of the job — not a nice-to-have.
This is Sinek’s leaders eat last idea in practice: the leader absorbs pressure from above and around the team so the team can do the actual work. That means calendar pressure, context-switching overhead, the ambient anxiety of too many open threads. If I’m just passing that noise through with a management layer on top, I’m not doing anything useful.
The obvious version is unnecessary meetings. But the harder version is subtler: the expectation of instant Slack replies, the reflex to CC everyone on a thread because it feels safer than deciding who actually needs to know, the meeting that could have been an async message.
I don’t know yet how much I’ll be able to influence this, or how much it’ll influence me. Month one feels like everyone is still figuring out how I operate.
Questions I’m actually sitting with #
- How do you know if your team is psychologically safe or just polite?
- When do you give someone more responsibility versus wait until they’re clearly ready?
- How do you stay technically credible without sliding back into doing too much technical work yourself?
- How do you deliver hard feedback to someone who’s very good at their job and knows it?
- How long until the feedback loops are long enough to actually learn from?
These aren’t rhetorical. I genuinely don’t have answers. I have hypotheses, informed by a lot of reading, that I’m about to test.
Why I’m writing this #
Sinek talks about the infinite game — the idea that some pursuits aren’t about winning, they’re about continuing to play and getting better over time. I think becoming a good manager is that kind of thing. There’s no point at which you’ve solved it. The goal is to stay honest about where you are.
The north star I started with has three parts. I’m early into the second. I’m actively trying to protect the third.
Most management writing I’ve found is either confident retrospectives from people decades in, or vague content about culture that doesn’t name the hard parts. What I’m looking for, and not finding much of, is the early, uncertain version. People one or two years in, saying: here’s what I thought, here’s what was actually true.
If that’s you, I’d genuinely like to hear it. What held up from the theory? What was completely wrong? What do you wish someone had told you in month one?
Find me on LinkedIn — I’ll read everything.