What Engineering Managers Do In Different Companies

This radar chart shows the relative emphasis (1-5 scale) that different companies place on various engineering management responsibilities. The data is based on data collected from open job descriptions in the last 12 months, blogs, published articles, and my own personal observations. I know each role varies over time and from team to team, so please keep in mind that this is a generalization.

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What each responsibility means in practice:

• People Management: Hiring, coaching, team morale, performance management, and career development. This includes work like holding 1:1s or skip-levels, giving feedback, writing promotion reviews, on-boarding new hires, developing retention strategies, and resolving interpersonal issues.
• Technical Strategy: Architecture decisions, technology choices, technical roadmap planning, and setting technical direction.
• Execution: Making sure the team ships work predictably and meets deadlines. This includes estimating and tracking work, managing scope and dependencies, unblocking engineers, and handling timeline or risk escalations.
• Product: Working with product managers and designers (or on your own) to define what gets built and why. This includes aligning on goals and priorities, product/market fit decisions, reviewing PRDs and design mocks, negotiating tradeoffs, and defining the product roadmap.
• Customer: Understanding and representing the needs of users. This includes analyzing customer feedback, reviewing usage and satisfaction metrics, participating in user research or interviews, and prioritizing work based on customer impact.
• Quality and Operational Excellence: Ensuring code quality, system reliability, and a smooth development process and release process. This includes promoting test coverage, driving on-call health and postmortems, addressing technical debt, and improving build and deployment workflows. Code review processes, testing strategies, reliability engineering, and quality assurance oversight.
• Cross-functional: Coordinating across organizations, functions, and teams to get things done. This includes working with Security, Legal, Infra, QA, Sales, or other departments; running cross-team meetings; representing your team in reviews; and leading org-wide initiatives.
• IC Work:Direct technical involvement through writing, reviewing, or debugging code. This includes reviewing pull requests, writing code or prototypes, debugging hard issues, or jumping into design sessions as a hands-on contributor. There some engineering managers who still build major features to stay connected to the craft.
• Tech Mentorship: Technical coaching, code reviews, architecture guidance, and technical skill development. Higher scores mean more technical teaching and mentoring.

How to interpret the chart: A score of 1 means minimal emphasis, while 5 indicates heavy focus. Companies with higher scores in certain areas typically expect managers to spend more time on those responsibilities.