What does your manager do anyway?
You just finished diagramming changes to the current architecture of the system that will yield twice the data processing speed. Now all you have to do is schedule thirty minutes on your manager’s calendar to review the changes and — OMG! Why are there so many colored boxes? Seriously? They have no free time until Thursday? — It’s right about then that you wonder:
“What does my manager do anyway?”
The first time I had to answer that question it was a total fumble.
“I spend a lot of time hiring and on phone screens,” I started. “Yea, and between that, doing one-on-ones with each person in the team… and there’s a long cross-functional meeting with customer success and sales…”
You see, the problem with that answer is that it describes how managers do what they do and not what managers do. If you’re a software developer, it’s the equivalent of describing your job as writing words in a text editor, drawing boxes on a whiteboard, and reviewing other people’s code. Those are the mechanics of software engineering, the means to an end. But you know that your role as a developer is to be boots on the ground builders. You‘re the ones that take the theoretically conceived product thoughts in the company’s consciousness and cleverly code it into reality. Okay, so if that’s what you do, what does your manager do? They simplify by abstraction.
“That makes no sense!” OK, let me explain. Let’s say that one of your sprint stories is to build a feature that generates an excel sheet with some data. The first thing you do is use that one weird trick that every successful developer knows, and assume that someone else already solved this problem. You go find that one excel writer library on Github. There are three things you expect that library to give you:
Dependency Management: Communication and coordination with all of the internal components like XML parser, file handler, and type formatters.
High-Level Interface: An API that will take in a command like “Write this giant 2D array as a sheet” and handle all of the subtleties of execution like weird cell formatting, string vs numeric, and date parsing.
Desired Result: It produces the right sequence of bits in the disk that accurately represents the data as an excel file.
All of that allows you, the end user, to not have to sweat the details. That’s the power of abstraction. And that’s your manager’s contribution. Think about the org graph of a company with all of the intersection of nodes and lines. Managers simplify the graph by replacing a group of nodes working closely together with a single representative node. Their role in an organization is to be the abstraction for their team.
Dependency Management, aka, Building a Team
“The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.” — Andy Grove in High Output Management
A manager is dependent on the people in their team to accomplish anything. So they run around making sure that everyone is engaged and inspired, that the team has strong bonds not just with the manager but with each other. This is why your manager loves doing one-on-ones with you, even the five minutes spent talking about your dog Marlowe’s latest adventures. It’s signal, it’s feedback, it’s relationship building. It’s mutual understanding that when the going gets tough you’ll both have each other’s back. Don’t mistake this for fuzzy feelings because it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. Strong bonds allow for direct and challenging feedback, you know, the type that punches your ego right in the gut. The strength of the relationship is what allows your manager to say to you “That was shoddy work. You can do better.” or you to say to them “You talk too much during team meetings, you should listen more.”, to say it with confident that though the other may feel temporarily hurt they will not feel disrespected.
High-Level Interface
A manager needs to be an effective interface for their team. This goes beyond sitting in meetings so that the team doesn’t have to. It means taking lofty ideas or requests like: “Hey platform team, let’s speed up data ingestion by an order of magnitude this quarter!” Digest it, prioritize it, and break it down to all of the details that need to happen. The communication also flows the other way, managers offer back pressure and make a case for additional time and resources. This is why your manager is running around constantly from meeting to meeting, stopping on the hallways to chat with Sarah from marketing and Joe from customer success. And when they give you a shout-out at the company all-hands, they are making sure everyone understands that though they are often seen as the face of the team, they are not the only ones doing the heavy lifting.
Desired Result
It’s amazing how when speaking to successful VPs of Engineering, they always end up emphasizing the importance of focusing on results. Everything else is an implementation detail. I was present at a talk by Wade Chambers (former VP of Engineering @ Twitter) and an audience member asked him:
“How much should I be coding as a manager? Or does it depend on how big the company is?”
“That’s simple,” Wade said. “What does it take to win?”
It wasn’t a rhetorical question but an honest invitation to ownership and by-any-means-necessary determination. The philosophy of your organizations is that your manager is given increase authority at the expectation of increased responsibility. At the end of the day, they are judged not by their mastery of SCRUM process, distributed system architecture, or even by how much you or the rest of your team likes them. No, the ultimate measuring stick is their consistent ability to get the team to produce results in volume and quality.
The most surprising thing about the transition was realizing that the job descriptions for a developer and a manager are very different. To be sure, there’s an overlap in the developer vs manager Venn Diagram, but it’s probably smaller than you think it is. Your manager’s job is to build a team, interface with the business, and produce the right results.
