How to Build the Engineering Manager Career Path

Katherine Spice from Octopus Electric Vehicles looked at 75 companies' public career frameworks on Progression.fyi and found just nine have an engineering management track. That's fewer than 20% of supposedly world's best companies who think engineering managers deserve explicit expectations and career development. Spice calls this a crisis, because people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. And organizations risk burning out their current engineering leadership because they can't connect with that many engineers anymore.

Engineering managers break down into four quadrants: people (retention, progression, psychological safety), culture (collaboration, processes, learning), delivery (velocity, release quality, value), technology (reliability, performance, roadmap). Some orgs have people-only EMs who never touch delivery, which works for agency models with changeable teams but robs managers of the cross-organizational view. Others combine people with delivery but no tech responsibility. The best model hits all three: people, delivery, tech. Why? Because VPs, directors, CTOs are responsible for all three. If you narrow an EM's focus down to just people or people plus delivery, they're not gaining experience for more senior roles. When EMs work together, they hit the fourth dimension of culture and become force multipliers through better hiring processes, best practices, guilds, team learning days.

The build versus buy decision isn't right or wrong but has tradeoffs. Build means promoting from within, which takes more time but retains talent and maintains domain knowledge. Green flags for internal promotion: actively helping those around them, providing good actionable feedback unprompted, leading ceremonies, simplifying story breakdowns to get to value quickly, delivery-focused, building relationships outside the team, considering business goals. Most important: ask if they want to be an engineering manager and make the role change reversible. Set a six month probation period where they can move back to engineering at same level and salary if it doesn't work out. Don't make them EM of their existing team, it's too hard to step away from the work they're already doing. Buy means recruiting externally, which brings fresh experience and new energy but costs more money upfront. De-risk by running multiple interviews across the four EM quadrants, facilitate mock technical interviews with principal engineers, use Context Action Result model for people challenges, even do weird awkward role plays.

Success metrics for new EMs aren't just lagging indicators like retention. Look for factors indicating psychological safety, particularly feedback being given by them and about them. Ask their direct reports, run team health checks every week or two. Watch how delivery velocity, release quality, and value change with the new manager. As they settle in, expect them to create a technology roadmap and deliver against it. Look for process improvements, learning culture developing, teammates offering to share things they've learned. Engineering managers are your future CTOs. If unsupported they can do quite a lot of damage, but if properly supported and properly invested in, they can really supercharge your work.