What Engineering Managers Are Actually For

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400

There’s a version of engineering management that shows up in a lot of technical writing: the EM as scorekeeper. They track metrics, run processes, attend meetings, and get out of the way of the engineers who do the real work. In this view, a great engineering team almost doesn’t need a manager – and a manager who does too much is probably just creating noise.

That view is wrong, and the teams that operate on it tend to show it eventually.

Team Performance on Rough Edges

What Engineering Managers Are Actually For