I've managed engineers at small (series A and B) startups as well as big companies, and I've found the challenges are very different at both. At small companie

I've managed engineers at small (series A and B) startups as well as big companies, and I've found the challenges are very different at both. At small companies, my biggest challenge has usually been employee growth/satisfaction and hiring. The saying "a rising tide lifts all boats" is very true at startups. Either everyone succeeds together, in which case even the below average performers will have great opportunities for growth and advancement, or everyone languishes and eventually fails together, in which case even the very top performers may have to go years without any real opportunities for advancement or raises. Some churn is inevitable in most startups when the trajectory of the company is not a perfectly smooth exponential (which it almost never is even in successful companies). Hiring is also difficult, because as the manager you often need to handle more of the process themselves without the support of a recruiting org, and you'll always be at a disadvantage not being able to pay nearly as much as big companies or have the name recognition so closing candidates can be much harder (at least for me, I'm not a natural salesperson so this is something I've really needed to work on). At big companies, my biggest challenge has been navigating the organizational complexity or what some might call "office politics". There is often no shortage of opportunities at big companies, the cool thing is that even modest improvements can lead to huge amounts of incremental revenue for the company. But there are also a lot of things that are less exciting but need to be done to keep the lights on. As a manager, if you have the chance to seek out the former kinds of opportunities for your team and get new exciting initiatives greenlit with upper management, that's often one of the best things you can do for them. Or if the purpose of the team is more the latter category, then it's your job as manager to still make sure everyone in the org understands that this is an important and high impact area, and that you can show clear success metrics of what your team doing a great job looks like. Individual growth and hiring are still important of course at big companies, but there are existing resources in HR and Recruiting that you can lean on to help with it (and there are often strict rules that mean you couldn't deviate from the official processes here even if you wanted to).