Five Facets of Engineering Leadership
an introduction to a framework, which may be useful
Engineering leadership isn't a science. It's a set of practices and skills. Leading engineering teams requires navigating a balance of tradeoffs between people, technology, and business outcomes. I've been putting some thought lately into hiring and assessing performance of engineering leaders. It's not completely unique to me. I've absorbed content from a lot of different sources, including an interview with Emil Eifrem on the Developing Leadership Podcast that prompted me to start writing some thoughts down. While I'm sure no framework is perfect, this one is landing well with me at the present stage. I'm currently thinking along the lines of five facets that form the foundation of great engineering leadership: People, Delivery, Operations, Strategy, and Business Impact.
These facets don't exist in isolation; they connect. Excellence in one area often enables success in others, overemphasis on one area can cause tradeoffs with others. And most importantly, neglect in any single facet can undermine the entire organization. An over-emphasis on delivery without strong people development creates burnout and turnover. Excessive focus on operations without strategic thinking leads to reshuffling deck chairs on a ship headed to nowhere. Too much strategy without solidly delivering results is like building a map to the end of the rainbow but never leaving the port.
The facets in brief...
The People facet is the starting point for any tech lead growing into a people manager. At its core, it's about creating environments where technical talent thrives through meaningful growth opportunities and psychological safety. However, mastering this skill also involves dealing with poor performance and addressing issues quickly and with empathy. A great people manager pushes each of his team members to be a better version of themselves, points out where they are not taking agency over their own destiny, and takes away excuses that are holding them back. It's not always about keeping individuals happy in a corner, it's about helping them win on the main stage.
As scope expands, people management evolves into building leadership benches, eliminating single points of failure, emphasizing fungibility, developing organizational culture, and creating scalable systems for growth and development across multiple teams. More senior levels of engineering leadership require balancing psychological needs with a sociological view of building an organization that drives business impact. This requires backbone and willingness to do and say the hard things.
The Delivery facet is where the rubber meets that road and is the most externally visible aspect of engineering. Delivery is essential to an engineering leader's success. Delivery requires going beyond being a nice people manager to being the coach who can take his team and drive the ball towards the goal. One of the most important delivery skills a manager can learn is saying "no". No sets a standard, defines a boundary, and enables the ability to prioritize. Saying No is really just the start of having the right conversation on focus and impact. Delivery also includes keeping an eye on quality. Quality is part of what you deliver. It's quite often that quality and delivery time end up being tradeoffs within any delivery cycle, and it's important for engineering managers to continuously help their teams make the appropriate tradeoffs between them.
Operations excellence starts with system reliability and a focus on metrics. Metrics are a proxy to understanding the customer experience. New leaders learn to build and maintain reliable systems and read and pay daily attention to the metrics flowing out of the system in order to understand how system performance is impacting customers. Failure detection becomes measured in minutes, not hours. Change is viewed as constant, but not allowed to degrade performance. Operations is not about preventing failure, rather it is a mindset focused on taming failure. Good operational practices require you to think about failure as something you try to coax into a state of minimal impact, while maximizing the learnings.
The Strategy facet is an important muscle, but takes time to develop right. I would encourage any engineering manager to master the first three before worrying whether they are strategic. However, by the time a leader is managing managers, they should be able to build a view on where the tech needs to head to meet the ever-changing tech landscape, keeping an eye on key technological advances, and finding every opportunity to skate where the puck is moving.
Being able to drive Business Impact is ultimately the goal of every engineering team. Every member of an engineering organization should understand how their role directly relates to moving the needle for the business, which unlocks autonomy and decentralized decision-making for the benefit of all. Good engineering leadership is able to pass enough business context on to teams that individuals can become empowered to make the right choices on where they focus and how they solve problems. That doesn't mean the team will always get it right. There is no magic sauce to decentralization, but the closest ingredient is lots of communication of context. Be real, be hands-on, and help the team, but help them by getting out of their way until you need to get in their way.
The power of this framework is that it can be used for hiring and performance conversations, and it scales across leadership levels. Each facet provides clear paths for growth and development, whether you're leading a single team or an entire organization. The weight given to each facet naturally shifts based on leadership level. Engineering managers and senior engineering managers typically concentrate on people development, day-to-day execution, and operational excellence. Their focus remains closer to the ground—building high-performing teams, delivering projects efficiently, and ensuring system reliability. More senior managers and directors should be proficient and then elevate their perspective. Their people focus changes from psychological to sociological. Delivery starts becoming more focused on GTM. Operational concerns expand to include risk management, security, and scale. Most importantly, they must dedicate significant energy to strategy and business impact—understanding market dynamics, talent relevance, driving tech innovation, and ensuring engineering efforts align with business objectives.
If this works out, I am hoping that in a set of future posts, we can spend more time doing a deep dive into each facet, exploring specific practices, metrics, and tools that engineering leaders can use to develop their capabilities. We'll examine how to assess your current state in each area and create actionable plans for improvement. Whether you're just starting your leadership journey or seeking to elevate your impact at a higher level, these facets provide a clear framework for continuous growth and development.
Stay tuned for our first deep dive into the People facet, where we'll explore some thoughts and ideas on performance and growth. Because great engineering leadership isn't about being perfect in all areas, it's about always learning.
I'd love to learn from you all. What parts of this don't quite resonate with you? Any frameworks you are using that you like better? I'd love to hear other perspectives.