...
/Managing ICs vs. Managing Managers
Managing ICs vs. Managing Managers
Learn the difference between ICs, EM, and senior EMs and how to manage all of them.
We'll cover the following...
- Managers of ICs vs. managers of managers
- Responsibilities of a senior EM
- Have you helped an IC to grow to become an EM?
- How do you help your EMs grow?
- Have you supported an underperforming team? How did you handle that?
- Have you restructured your organization? What was the motivation behind it?
- Challenges faced during a reorg
- Red flags
Managers of ICs vs. managers of managers
Managers of individual contributors are mostly EM1s. They are much closer to the real engineering processes: day-to-day execution, writing code, project management, etc. However, their scope is relatively narrower than managers of managers (usually also referred to as EM2s or as senior EMs). Senior EMs have a much larger scope because they manage multiple teams.
Senior EMs generally have more complex stories around managing low performers, growing people, and conflict resolution. Senior EMs should have experience in managing managers and growing ICs into managers. Senior EMs also have experience in organization building, organization restructuring, and looking at a much bigger picture.
Senior EMs are not only responsible for the execution and planning only. They are visionaries and are also responsible for defining the mission and strategy of the team. They should be able to define long-term and short-term strategies for a bigger team while working with individual managers and senior engineers.
Responsibilities of a senior EM
Senior EMs support multiple managers and have a skillset to manage multiple teams. Due to having a much broader scope and more visibility to various parts of the organization, senior EMs are in a better position to ensure that teams have the right prioritizations. They generally also don't have emotional attachments toward individual projects and can make unbiased decisions more easily than EM1s. Since EM1s are directly involved in project execution and have invested time and effort in developing these, it is hard to be unbiased and give up their projects even if that is the right thing to do. For example, a team has invested six months in developing a project, but later realizes that the results are not as expected, and it is not worth investing in this project anymore. It will be difficult for an EM1 to make such a hard decision due to their and their immediate team’s personal involvement. However, senior EMs can make a more informed and objective decision about whether it should be launched or not while keeping the interests of the teams and company in mind.
Some of ...