Beyond the Stand-Up: Two Essential Jobs of Every Engineering Manager

In the chaotic world of technology, the role of an engineering manager is constantly evolving. It's no longer just about running sprints, assigning tasks, or putting out fires. While those are still part of the job, the most impactful managers understand that their essential work extends far beyond the day-to-day execution. They are the crucial link between their team's hard work and the organization's success.

Two particularly vital, and often under-utilized, aspects of the modern engineering manager's job are:

1. Mastering the Art of Presenting Your Team's Value: Clearly articulating your team’s impact on the rest of the organization.

2. Championing Your Team's Ongoing Relevance: Especially critical in today's rapidly changing landscape influenced by AI.

Let's dive into why these are essential.

Be Your Team's Advocate: Presenting Their Value

Your team is likely doing incredible work, building features, squashing bugs, improving systems, and enabling other teams. But does the rest of the company truly understand the value and impact of that work? This is where you come in. It's your job to translate your team’s technical achievements into tangible business value and communicate them effectively.

Think of yourself as your team's chief storyteller and data analyst for the rest of your team. This involves:

• Connecting Work to Metrics: Don't just report on tasks completed. Show how your team's efforts move the needle on core business or technical metrics that matter to the organization.

• Using Data to Tell the Story: Data isn't just for engineers; it's your most powerful tool for demonstrating impact. Quantify your team's contributions, whether it's uptime percentage, latency improvements, customer adoption of a feature, or efficiency gains.

• Translating Technical Wins to Business Outcomes: Your team launched a new caching layer? That's great! Now, explain how that reduced latency by X milliseconds, which led to a Y% improvement in user satisfaction and a Z% reduction in infrastructure costs.

Let's walk through an example: Imagine your team is responsible for a system that generates weekly alerts, and over the last month, the number of alerts has been trending down significantly.

• Show the Data: Present a clear graph showing the downward trend in weekly alerts over the past month (and perhaps compare it to previous periods).

• Explain the "Why": Briefly walk through the technical changes or process improvements your team implemented that led to this reduction (e.g., fixed a flapping dependency, improved error handling, deployed a more robust monitoring configuration).

• Demonstrate the Impact (Team, Org, Company): This is where you connect the dots:

  • Team Impact: "This reduction means our on-call engineers are spending X fewer hours per week investigating non-critical alerts, freeing up their time for higher-impact project work."

  • Organizational Impact: "This improved stability means teams relying on our system are experiencing fewer disruptions and have greater confidence in its reliability, improving cross-team collaboration and efficiency."

  • Company Impact: "Ultimately, this leads to improved system uptime and performance, contributing directly to a better customer experience and reducing potential revenue loss due to incidents."

This kind of data-backed, impact-focused communication can be delivered in various ways. A dedicated 5-minute segment in a cross-functional meeting, a concise update in a company-wide communication channel, or key highlights on a shared dashboard. The key is consistency and clarity in connecting your team's work to the bigger picture.

Your role is to articulate how your team provides these irreplaceable human contributions. Showcase instances where your team:

• Developed an innovative solution that wouldn't have been possible through automation alone.

• Successfully navigated a complex, ambiguous problem that required significant human collaboration and judgment.

• Leveraged new tools like AI to become even more productive and effective, demonstrating their adaptability and forward-thinking approach.

• Contributed strategic insights that shaped the product or technical direction.

Promote your team not just as executors of tasks, but as critical thinkers, innovators, and strategic partners who use the best available tools (including AI) to deliver outsized value. Highlight their ability to adapt to new technologies and their essential role in the strategic thinking and human collaboration necessary for continued success.

The role of an engineering manager is multifaceted, but the ability to effectively present your team's value and champion its relevance is a non-negotiable essential in today's environment. By consistently connecting your team's work to tangible outcomes and articulating their unique human contributions in the age of AI, you not only advocate for your team but also solidify your own position as a strategic leader who drives real impact.