Getting promoted to Engineering Manager

Betting on the right horse

Up to the senior engineering level, promotions depend mainly on meeting the proficiency bar for technical skills and communication abilities.

But after reaching senior level, whether the next step is Staff Engineer or Manager, clearing the proficiency bar alone isn't enough—there must also be a "business need." Typically, a new manager role opens when another manager leaves or when a new squad is formed.

This "business need" means that advancing beyond senior engineer relies not just on you but also on your company's circumstances. It's much harder to get promoted in companies that aren't growing because new squads are rarely formed, and when a managerial position opens up, many internal candidates will compete for it.

It also explains why more aggressively growing companies, like well-funded startups, can be attractive. They constantly need to find new ways to capture more market share, resulting in frequent hiring, formation of new squads, and consequently, more managerial roles.

If you want to accelerate your career growth, that's where you should go. You'll likely have greater opportunities to handle significant challenges and rapidly develop your skills. The trade-offs are usually job stability and possibly a lower starting salary.

Before accepting a new role, take the time to research the company's growth trajectory. Publicly available metrics such as overall headcount growth, Glassdoor reviews, funding rounds, and media coverage are useful indicators of a company's health.

For larger companies, you can also assess their long-term potential by reviewing customer experiences on Reddit or other forums. Satisfied customers are the main signal of a company in a positive trajectory.

Being the CEO of your career

It's important not to take a passive approach to your career advancement. There's a well-known saying in Western culture: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." In conversations with friends who mentioned deep frustrations at work, I would often ask, "What does your manager say when you discuss it?" Surprisingly often, they had never even brought it up.

Ideally, your manager should initiate conversations about your career development at least every six months. Unfortunately, many managers shy away from this responsibility, and you'll likely need to proactively bring up these discussions yourself.

Nobody is more invested in your career than you. Be explicit about your career goals during your one-on-ones with your manager. This enables more relevant feedback tailored to your desired path and helps your manager to identify skills that you should focus on.

If your current manager understands your ambition to move into management, they can more effectively mentor you by highlighting relevant managerial lessons from situations that arise. Without an awareness of your aspirations, they may not take the opportunity to provide valuable context or guidance.

For example, an engineer lacking managerial skills might hold a decision-making meeting without clearly assigning tasks before the meeting ends. While the manager may choose to cover for them, meaningful feedback or possible alternative solutions might only surface if the manager knows the engineer's ambitions toward management.

Try to align with your manager and seek opportunities to learn essential managerial skills while still in your current role as an individual contributor—you can do things like interviewing candidates, running some cerimonies and meetings, and interacting with customers directly.

If possible, schedule occasional skip-level meetings with your director as well. These conversations offer insights into the company's higher-level challenges and opportunities to build rapport with someone who could potentially become your future boss.

Showing signs of leadership

Engineering managers generally know exactly which individual contributors (ICs) on their teams are fully prepared to step into managerial roles if needed. Typically, these people are highly competent senior ICs who teammates naturally approach when they need help. They're effective communicators, strong mentors, and are skilled at analyzing business requirements alongside technical tradeoffs. This makes them "go-to" advisors for their colleagues.

Another invaluable trait managers look for is curiosity, which is essential when offering feedback constructively. For instance, if a colleague writes "bad code" in a PR, instead of calling them out for it, ask why they chose that approach rather than the accepted 'ideal' method. Asking leading questions rather than challanging directly demonstrates trust in their abilities and encourages them to reflect and learn.

Force multiplier

One of the most powerful actions you can take if you're seeking career growth is to position yourself as a "force multiplier." Although this concept often goes unnoticed among engineers, it can significantly impact a project's success. Force multiplier work refers to activities that, once completed, enable others on the team to deliver their work faster and more effectively.

Whether your aspiration is to become a Staff Engineer or Engineering Manager, becoming a force multiplier is an essential milestone you'll need to achieve. Staff engineers or architects don't necessarily do 2-10 times the coding work of senior engineers. Instead, they identify the most impactful opportunities making their teams 2-10 times more productive.

For example, if frequent production bugs constantly stall your team's progress, implementing critical automated testing can be a significant multiplier. This ensures improvements can safely ship and saves hours of debugging later.

Another scenario could be a situation where shifting technical requirements frequently force engineers to rewrite code again and again. One engineer who effectively communicates with stakeholders and creates comprehensive technical specifications before coding begins can save the team hours of redundant work.

Force multiplier efforts increase everyone's efficiency. Imagine you reduce your teammates' task times by 5 minutes each, and they complete around 3 tasks per day. Across a 5-person team, you've effectively added up to 375 working days per year to your team's productivity!

Identifying possible multipliers can be challenging since they're often highly specific to a particular codebase or team dynamic. However, common areas worth exploring include:

• Overly complex architecture forcing engineers to duplicate code across multiple areas of the project, introducing bugs.
• Lack of robust quality checks that slow engineers due to manual testing and bug-fixing cycles.
• Outdated technology versions or "reinvent-the-wheel" solutions complicating maintenance and hindering easy troubleshooting from community documentation.
• Non-technical process inefficiencies, such as unclear ticket structures and ineffective planning ceremonies, adding unnecessary overhead.

The greater the number of people impacted by your improvement, the stronger the multiplier effect.

Look proactively for gaps within your team's workflow or processes. Your manager can help you spot these bottlenecks, but as someone actively coding, you're perfectly placed to notice inefficiencies firsthand. Asking your teammates directly what they like or dislike about the project can also yield valuable insights.

Getting your foot in the door

Strive to progressively take on managerial responsibilities through incremental trust-building with your manager and teammates. Promotions to manager roles appears to happens overnight but takes months of gradual progression.

Like many others, I started as a tech lead at a growing startup, and my responsibilities gradually shifted—from code architecture tasks to hiring, mentoring, and client interaction. Eventually, I found myself spending most of my time managing and mentoring rather than coding.

When it became clear that I was essentially doing managerial work without official recognition, I approached my CTO about it. The following week, he officially granted me the title and tasked me with hiring a second team as part of a strategic company initiative.

Finally, even if promotion doesn't happen in your current company, the skills and experiences you develop make excellent talking points when interviewing elsewhere. And that sets the stage for our next chapter…