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> Similarly, being closer to "the knowledge" tends to make you poorly informed about other important aspects of your business, almost unavoidably. This informat

> Similarly, being closer to "the knowledge" tends to make you poorly informed about other important aspects of your business, almost unavoidably. This information is often critical to actual success, more than IC's/engineers often realize. But the question is here the same: is the manager most informed to take the decisions? I would expect the functional analyst to know most about the domain and what is required, and the sales or business development people about how to extract money out of the customer. In all cases, I think the experts of all fields are at the lowest level. > Done well, a good EM will be an interface between the goals (from above) and capabilities (from below) and keeping them aligned. I agree that the vision needs to come from the top downwards. That means "where do we want to go", but the "how will we do this", is in my opinion all the people at the lowest levels. As for capabilities, a great manager will present what needs to be done to the team, and the team will decide what effort will be required.

ska 4y ago
> is the manager most informed to take the decisions? Often, yes. Or at least knows who is, and how to put it to them. Put another way, the domain experts are usually the best people to describe the tradeoffs but often don't have a sufficiently broad view to make the decisions. Obviously this isn't universal - one key skill in engineering management is empowering your team to make all the decisions they can most usefully make, and facilitating their input to the ones they can't. > As for capabilities, a great manager will present what needs to be done to the team, and the team will decide what effort will be required. I think this really misses the point. With a great manager, a team will fire on all cylinders; rarely is this true without at least a good one (exceptions made for small, experienced teams in certain circumstances). You are describing more of a project manager "hat", which sometimes is worn by an engineering manager, but need not be.

ska 4y ago

> is the manager most informed to take the decisions? Often, yes. Or at least knows who is, and how to put it to them. Put another way, the domain experts are usually the best people to describe the tradeoffs but often don't have a sufficiently broad view to make the decisions. Obviously this isn't universal - one key skill in engineering management is empowering your team to make all the decisions they can most usefully make, and facilitating their input to the ones they can't. > As for capabilities, a great manager will present what needs to be done to the team, and the team will decide what effort will be required. I think this really misses the point. With a great manager, a team will fire on all cylinders; rarely is this true without at least a good one (exceptions made for small, experienced teams in certain circumstances). You are describing more of a project manager "hat", which sometimes is worn by an engineering manager, but need not be.