Developing your career is building skills to grow the impact you have on an organization. After a certain point engineers typically decide to either go down an individual contributor path or a management one. Recently, I decided to try engineering management. My company had me manage six engineers in a recently formed team. In my first six months as a manager I developed the team’s process for getting work done, learned the basics of managing career development, and positioned my team within the larger engineering organization. I also learned about balancing competing priorities and moving a diverse set of personalities and desires towards a common goal.
In this talk I intend to talk specifically about the role of a manager of a single team. I will go over the types of problems a manager is responsible for and discuss the value a good manager can bring to a team/organization. I will help attendees understand the perspective of their current manager and help them decide if management is something they would be interested in trying out themselves.