Q&A: How an IC Made the Leap to Engineering Manager

Muhammad Ikram ul Haq is a founding team member of Katanemo and a highly accomplished engineering leader. With 15+ years of experience, he has made significant contributions to renowned companies such as Meta, Lyft, Microsoft, and eBay. He was part of the founding team at Microsoft Azure, played a key role in establishing the infrastructure team at Lyft, and led the training data infrastructure team at Facebook. His expertise lies in building large-scale distributed systems that power highly scalable products used by billions of people.

Being a great engineer doesn’t guarantee you’ll be a successful manager. You’ll have to embrace a completely new mindset and set of skills to take on this new phase of your career and transition to meeting different performance metrics. Leadership transcends managing a team; it’s about supporting your peers, fostering their growth, and addressing challenges collaboratively. While individual contributors may not oversee a team, they have the potential to lead, inspire, and initiate meaningful progress in an organization. Understanding this is integral to grasping how to become an engineering manager. An individual contributor needs guidance on how to become an engineering manager. You also need a solid plan for your engineering manager interview prep. Switching to a leadership role entails inspiring, growing, and solving your peers’ problems. It is not impossible to learn to manage a team. You can bring positive changes to your organization and inspire others.

To answer some common questions about the transition from IC to manager, the Educative Team spoke with Muhammad Ikram ul Haq, co-founder of Katanemo, and former engineering leader at Facebook, Lyft, and Microsoft.

Transition from IC to manager#

These are some things that you need to do to ensure a smooth transition to the role of a manager:

• Shift your perspective from ‘me’ to ‘we’
• Delegate tasks and don’t get burnt out
• Connect with your team members on an individual level
• Listen more to build trust Develop your authentic leadership style

You can watch the full webinar—or keep reading for highlights of Ikram’s lessons from working at the largest tech companies in the world.

• Should I become an engineering manager?
• What can you expect during the transition from IC to engineering manager?
• How can you prepare to succeed as a new engineering manager?
• How has the market slowdown impacted engineering managers?

Tips to Help You Transition#

When transitioning from an individual contributor, it’s essential to shift your viewpoint:

• Delegate tasks effectively to achieve success.
• Prioritize understanding and empathizing before seeking assistance.
• Remember, active listening is key: listen twice as much as you speak.
• Establish and refine your unique leadership approach in this new managerial role.

Should I become an engineering manager?#

This is one of the most common questions I receive from ICs who are considering engineering management. Ultimately, only you can decide if becoming an engineering manager is the right fit for your skills and interests. However, I’ll discuss the core skills and expectations of successful managers to help you make an informed choice about your career path.

Prerequisites#

To be considered for engineering manager roles, there are two criteria you’ll need to meet:

1. You are a strong technical leader and successful IC.#

The first step toward becoming an engineering manager is being a great engineer. As you build a reputation for strong technical contributions, pursue leadership opportunities on your team. This will show your manager that you have the necessary skills and initiative to make the shift.

2. You have a track record of successful cross-team and cross-functional collaboration.#

Engineering managers don’t just collaborate with engineers—they facilitate productive working relationships across teams and functions. As an IC, seek out opportunities to work with as many teams as possible. These might include product, quality assurance, operations, and design.

People Management#

ICs make a direct impact through technical contributions. Engineering managers deliver impact through others. You might still code, but your new definition of success is delivering business results from a happy and growing team.

To meet this definition of success, you’ll need to:

1. Lead effective 1:1s.#

Weekly 1:1s with direct reports (as a new EM, you can expect to lead a team of 4-5 people) are the most important meetings on your calendar. Avoid rescheduling them or treating them as status updates. 1:1s are where you build trust with engineers, develop growth plans to help them succeed, and work together to navigate challenges.

2. Develop growth plans.#

Effective managers work with engineers to identify career goals and break them down into a roadmap of achievable milestones. Growth plans might include mentorship, courses/trainings, and special projects designed to help engineers build relevant skills and experience.

As engineers work towards these milestones, you’ll provide consistent, actionable, and respectful feedback to keep them on track.

3. Manage high and low performers.#

It’s important to grow engineers through learning resources and mentorship, but you’ll also want to create a high-level management strategy based on the overall experience level of your team.

For instance, I once acquired a team at Lyft after the tech lead and engineering manager left. The engineers were smart, but lacked technical experience. I knew it would take a long time to accelerate our team with individual growth plans alone. To reduce ramp-up time, I recruited a senior engineer from another team to be our technical lead.

4. Resolve conflicts.#

Working through conflict is a necessary skill for any team member. As a manager, you’ll also provide mentorship and create team processes to foster this skill in others. Empowering your team to navigate conflict productively and respectfully is crucial to effective people management.

Project Management#

After spending years as a technical lead, I assumed I had all the necessary project management skills to excel as an engineering manager. I quickly discovered there was a steep learning curve.

While technical leads may collaborate with engineering managers to shape the direction of the team, engineering managers are responsible for setting up strategy and direction in the short and long term. This requires engineering managers to weigh tradeoffs while navigating a high degree of complexity and ambiguity.

Even with your leadership experience, it will take practice to become comfortable with uncertainty. You can expect to make a lot of mistakes. The important thing is accepting feedback gracefully and using these learnings to improve your decision-making.

Performance Evaluation, Hiring, and Team Building#

To keep your team happy and growing, you’ll collaborate with leadership to oversee every milestone of an engineer’s tenure, from interview to promotion. Responsibilities include:

• Providing feedback to help engineers succeed (in regular 1:1s and performance reviews)
• Hiring new talent to help your team meet business goals
• Fostering productive working relationships between team members

Activities like performance reviews and interviews are very different from the technical work that filled your days as an IC. Before pursuing engineering management, it’s important to recognize that an EM’s goal is to enable technical excellence in others. Your day-to-day work will focus on empowering people to reach their full potential as engineers.

To hear the rest of Ikram’s insights on the following questions, check out the full webinar:

• What can you expect during the transition from IC to engineering manager?
• How can you prepare to succeed as a new engineering manager?
• How has the market slowdown impacted engineering managers?