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In this video, Sergio Cruz (SWE Director) talks about the most valuable skills engineering managers can have to lead their teams. From technical backgrounds to micromanagement, these skills are crucial to being an effective engineering manager.

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Chapters - 
00:00 - Introduction
01:12 - Most important skill for an engineering manager?
03:27 - Other important skills beyond tech
06:16 - Mentoring vs Micromanaging
09:14 - Making it safe for team members to fail.
12:32 - Promoting psychological safety

#engineeringmanagement #amazon #EM #software #entrepreneurship #interview #management #exponent

What do you think is the most important skill for an engineering manager to have?

Hi everyone, we're here today with Sergio to talk about what the most important skills for an engineering manager to have are.

For those of you who aren't already familiar with Exponent, Exponent helps you get your dream tech career with our online courses, expert coaching, peer to peer mock interviewing platform, and interview question database.

Okay, thanks for returning again, Sergio.

This is yet another important topic that I think you're going to have some really valuable insights for us on.

But before we jump into that, could you introduce yourself again for our viewers?

So I am Sergio Cruz and I am a software engineering director currently working at Ramsey Solutions where I lead a couple of product teams.

And I'm super stoked to be talking about this topic today.

It's something I have conversations with my friends all the time and about and yeah excited to be diving into it.

And you've been an engineering manager yourself before too.

So I think your experience will be really helpful here.

Okay, but let's just start with some of the basics actually.

Engie, I just shared a tweet with you that our good friend Elon Musk put out a little while ago and I'll read it it goes like this I strongly believe he says I strongly believe that all managers in a technical area must be technically excellent Managers and software must write great software or it's like being a cavalry captain who can't ride a horse.

But I've had bosses before that had no idea what I did.

And then they would try to tell me how to do my job, but they didn't know the first thing about software.

I know exactly where he's coming from with this, and it's not fun.

It is so important that an engineering manager leading an area of technology has some background in that technology that the team focuses on so that they can provide input into what they their teams do and coach their teams and how to be better over time and how to produce high quality code and products and things like that.

So I love where Elon Musk is coming from on this tweet.

I've experienced that pain point myself and it's super important.

It is very important that an engineering manager knows what the heck the team is even doing, right?

Like they need to have had some background, some technical background to be able to coach their teams.

And so on top of the technical skills though, like let's say, now you have a manager who is very, very competent at those technical skills.

What do you think is important beyond that?

Yeah, the question you asked Angie was, what is the most important skill?

And for me, what Elon's saying, and I absolutely agree with him, but let's assume that that's table stakes, right?

And I know that it's not, and there are some places in the industry where that's not true, and I really wish that that was different.

But, okay, assuming that that's table stakes and that engineering managers have a technical background and that they can objectively coach their team members on the scale.

I think beyond that, so a temptation for a person who used to be an engineer and then a senior engineer and then maybe a principal or staff engineer right and then became a manager is that they want things to look the same exact way that they would have done or built themselves, right?

So the temptation there is to micromanage their teams.

The temptation is, oh my gosh, You built it in this way, and I think it should be that way.

You're using two-space indentation, but back in my day, we used to use tabs because they're configurable.

Those are the things that you have to, as a manager, to be able to empower your teams to grow in autonomy and be able to make decisions themselves.

At some point, their skill is going to grow beyond the skill that you once had, and you still need to be coaching them on how to become better.

But if you're constantly trying to micromanage and try to make them work in the same way that you would have once done, then at that point you're just a micromanager and the quality of work that gets done will always be limited to your own abilities, to your own technical aptitude.

So that's how it would go beyond, like if it's table stakes, right, to have technical skills, but beyond that, you have to be empowering your team.

That's how they produce work together, collectively.

They produce work that's way better than you would have done yourself if you were the only 1 working on the thing.

Yeah, and I really like that point that to see it as micromanaging, as not micromanaging as a way to help your team grow.

You know, I think that's a really important point.

So I'm curious though, because sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to tell the difference between being a strong mentor versus micromanaging.

Are there any ways where you can tell where that line lies?

And like, do you have like a personal story of like a time where you had to be able to tell where that line was?

So there was a time where I joined a very early stage startup as the first engineer after the technical co-founder, right?

So very small, it was just that person and myself, and I built the initial product.

And it went well, and it succeeded, right?

And then it got to a point where we wanted to keep growing, and we had to start hiring engineers.

And kind of by default, I became the manager, right, or the boss.

And I had no idea what I was doing as far as managing it.

And in my mind, well, I had built this initial product and it was successful.

So I had to tell them exactly how they needed to write their code because I built it initially and obviously I knew what needed to happen and they did it.

So what I've learned since then, and that was a mistake that didn't work and I had to change my style, is that you know when you have a group of people thinking about a specific domain that's always you know when you few heads together will come up with better solutions than just 1 person will, right?

So I had to rely on them and trust them to come up with solutions that a lot of times I wouldn't have thought of myself, right?

However, at the same time I had to objectively measure and judge those ideas and those suggestions.

You know, are there obvious pitfalls here that I've seen play out in the past that if we go down this route will obviously happen Or is it 1 of those things, hey, let's give it some latitude here.

Maybe it'll go poorly, maybe it won't, but the learnings are worth it.

So within time, you start getting some raps at that, but that's 1 of those things that I had, nobody took the time, Angie, in the very beginning to explain that to me.

That micromanaging, but also coaching, it is a really fine line.

But I like also what you said about how when done right, it allows your team members to be able to take like manageable, manageable or like calculated risks that like makes the product better in general.

So how do you make it safe for your team members to do so?

I, the reason why I became a competent engineer over time back when I was an engineer was because I made tons of mistakes and I learned from them, right?

And now there are some obvious pitfalls that I didn't have to fall into anymore because I have some experience to rely on, right?

But somebody had to make it okay for me to fail because Had I gotten fired the first time I made a mistake, I would have never been able to learn upon it and then keep explaining that knowledge, right?

So I didn't appreciate that enough at the time.

Calculated risks, because the learning is typically worth it.

You don't want to make a mistake that's going to cost more than the company can afford or, you know, I mean, you have to be able to, as a leader, you have to be able to calculate that risk.

But as long as it's within that acceptable range, you have to give people latitude to try and make mistakes.

You know, so again, how do you make it safe?

Well, if your team is constantly afraid that the moment they make the first mistake you're going to fire them or you're going to yell at them or you're going to...

What you reward as a leader gets repeated.

So if you reward people when they make a mistake, but the learnings that come on the other side of it are a little gold mine, then they'll feel like it's okay for them to be experimenting and trying new things.

As long as it's, again, aligned with where we want to go as a company or as a team, right?

But if you yell at them, if you threaten them and you do not reward that kind of behavior, then that'll lead into overly protecting their image, right, Or their reputation.

And they'll lie when they make a mistake and they'll tell you that they didn't.

Or they'll hide it or they'll try to fix it real fast before you realize it.

So let's just accept that fact and make it okay and fun and literally reward them for it.

And that those behaviors will keep being repeated.

And it sounds like what you're saying is that it's important to establish psychological safety in a variety of contexts, not just when people are making mistakes so that when they do make mistakes, they feel safe enough to like, be honest about it and talk about it and figure out how to move forward from it.

But I'm wondering, so when people aren't making mistakes, are there ways that you can still proactively promote psychological safety?

So I have a pretty unique way of leading people.

Maybe it's not all that unique, but I just think about it this way.

It's not just a 9 to 5, you know, version of them.

Or that engineering manager and the skills that they bring to the table.

Because the reality is if they're having a hard time at home, if they're having a hard time, you know, I don't know, if they have a sick child or maybe their pet is not doing so well, that inevitably will impact the quality of their work because they're trying to be focused, they're trying to be here, but on the back of their mind, there's all those problems going on, right?

So what I try to do as a leader, I make it okay for us to talk about those things.

You know, I won't, I'll always respect their boundaries, right?

So if they just don't want to go there, if they're not ready to talk about it, hey that's totally fine.

But by and large, I really try to make it okay for us to talk about things that are good in our lives and things that are challenging in our lives right now.

And then, and then, I try to make it okay for them to talk to each other about it.

So I try to establish, it's funny, so my team, we have this thing where we meet every week and we have a connect where we just it's not the place where we're talking about hard skills engineering.

We get in there just to sometimes I'll give some updates on what's going on around the business right in the very beginning but then we'll just talk about hey how's your week going what's going on right Some people like to call it the feelings meeting.

I don't know how it became the feelings meeting, Andrew.

It's clearly called an engineering connect, but somehow they started nicknaming it feelings meeting, but it's true.

It's okay to talk about your feelings and nerves.

There's something that's bugging you, be it at work or at home.

Now, hey, there's still, this is still a workplace, right?

So have some good people, smart, just to not overshare, you know.

And I'll pull them aside later and I'll tell them, hey, like, that was weird.

But, but by and large, when you start encouraging it to be OK to be human in the workplace, you know, gosh, they'll, they'll bring it their all, and I've seen it.

And they'll start helping each other through that.

And they'll learn what some of the cues are.

Hey, let me give them a little bit of encouragement, right?

Like things like that, they'll kind of start self-organizing and it becomes the culture of the team and amazing things happen when you have a healthy culture and there's good psychological safety.

I do like how like this feelings meeting seems to foster like implicitly this culture of trust and openness.

And it helps people feel accepted for who they are so that when you do reach like moments of stress or crises, it's easier for people to like just naturally band together and help each other and accept and not blame each other, you know.

You know, my philosophy is this, if they feel safe and they have that courage to take risks, then they're going to take me places that I've never thought of even going.

You know, if I make it okay for them to fail and make it okay for them to innovate and go to places we haven't gone before, my goodness, like the sky's the limit as to what we can produce, you know.

So it does connect back to like, there's still a business reason behind it all, you know, like, like it, because again, because we are a business and we're trying to grow and, and, you know, and get into different turns.

So like, it does connect back, but it does in such a fun way and you know with great levity and things like that.

But also again they create things and and create concepts that I wouldn't have never thought of myself if we were stuck in this command and control style of leadership where they only do what I tell them to do, you know?

Like, gosh, these are brilliant, creative people.

I think Steve Jobs used to say this, like, why would I hire super smart people and then keep telling them what to do?

They need to be telling me what I need to do.

But the way you do that is by creating an environment where it is okay for them to take risks, fail, learn, innovate, and keep going.

And I think that's a really excellent point to close on.

I think you've offered us so much wisdom today, both from yourself and then also from Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as well.

So thank you for being here today and like telling us a little bit about like what the most important skill an engineering manager can have.

And for everybody who's watching, thank you for being here with us today and check out Exponent at triexponent.com.

Don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you.

And of course, check out hundreds more videos just like this at triexponent.com.

Thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview.


Speaker 0: What do you think is the most important skill for an engineering manager to have? Hi everyone, we're here today with Sergio to talk about what the most important skills for an engineering manager to have are. For those of you who aren't already familiar with Exponent, Exponent helps you get your dream tech career with our online courses, expert coaching, peer to peer mock interviewing platform, and interview question database. Check it out at tryexponent.com. Okay, thanks for returning again, Sergio.

This is yet another important topic that I think you're going to have some really valuable insights for us on. But before we jump into that, could you introduce yourself again for our viewers? 100%.

Speaker 1: So I am Sergio Cruz and I am a software engineering director currently working at Ramsey Solutions where I lead a couple of product teams. And I'm super stoked to be talking about this topic today. It's something I have conversations with my friends all the time and about and yeah excited to be diving into it.

Speaker 0: Yeah, I'm excited too. And you've been an engineering manager yourself before too. So I think your experience will be really helpful here.

Speaker 1: Absolutely.

Speaker 0: Okay, but let's just start with some of the basics actually. What do you think is the most important skill for an engineering manager to have?

Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been reflecting on this 1. Engie, I just shared a tweet with you that our good friend Elon Musk put out a little while ago and I'll read it it goes like this I strongly believe he says I strongly believe that all managers in a technical area must be technically excellent Managers and software must write great software or it's like being a cavalry captain who can't ride a horse.

Speaker 0: That's quite the soundbite. What do you think that means to you? I love it.

Speaker 1: But I've had bosses before that had no idea what I did. And then they would try to tell me how to do my job, but they didn't know the first thing about software. I know exactly where he's coming from with this, and it's not fun. And I absolutely agree. It is so important that an engineering manager leading an area of technology has some background in that technology that the team focuses on so that they can provide input into what they their teams do and coach their teams and how to be better over time and how to produce high quality code and products and things like that.

So I love where Elon Musk is coming from on this tweet. I've experienced that pain point myself and it's super important. It is very important that an engineering manager knows what the heck the team is even doing, right? Like they need to have had some background, some technical background to be able to coach their teams.

Speaker 0: Yeah, definitely. That makes a lot of sense. And so on top of the technical skills though, like let's say, now you have a manager who is very, very competent at those technical skills. What do you think is important beyond that?

Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, the question you asked Angie was, what is the most important skill? And for me, what Elon's saying, and I absolutely agree with him, but let's assume that that's table stakes, right? And I know that it's not, and there are some places in the industry where that's not true, and I really wish that that was different. But, okay, assuming that that's table stakes and that engineering managers have a technical background and that they can objectively coach their team members on the scale.

I think beyond that, so a temptation for a person who used to be an engineer and then a senior engineer and then maybe a principal or staff engineer right and then became a manager is that they want things to look the same exact way that they would have done or built themselves, right? So the temptation there is to micromanage their teams. The temptation is, oh my gosh, You built it in this way, and I think it should be that way. You're using two-space indentation, but back in my day, we used to use tabs because they're configurable. Or, my goodness, 4 spaces, right?

And you need to be doing that. Those are the things that you have to, as a manager, to be able to empower your teams to grow in autonomy and be able to make decisions themselves. At some point, their skill is going to grow beyond the skill that you once had, and you still need to be coaching them on how to become better. But if you're constantly trying to micromanage and try to make them work in the same way that you would have once done, then at that point you're just a micromanager and the quality of work that gets done will always be limited to your own abilities, to your own technical aptitude. So that's how it would go beyond, like if it's table stakes, right, to have technical skills, but beyond that, you have to be empowering your team.

That's how they produce work together, collectively. They produce work that's way better than you would have done yourself if you were the only 1 working on the thing.

Speaker 0: Yeah, and I really like that point that to see it as micromanaging, as not micromanaging as a way to help your team grow. You know, I think that's a really important point. So I'm curious though, because sometimes it can be a little bit difficult to tell the difference between being a strong mentor versus micromanaging. Are there any ways where you can tell where that line lies? And like, do you have like a personal story of like a time where you had to be able to tell where that line was?

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, Angie. So there was a time where I joined a very early stage startup as the first engineer after the technical co-founder, right? So very small, it was just that person and myself, and I built the initial product. And it went well, and it succeeded, right? And then it got to a point where we wanted to keep growing, and we had to start hiring engineers.

And kind of by default, I became the manager, right, or the boss. And I had no idea what I was doing as far as managing it. I had never done that before, right? And in my mind, well, I had built this initial product and it was successful. So I had to tell them exactly how they needed to write their code because I built it initially and obviously I knew what needed to happen and they did it.

So what I've learned since then, and that was a mistake that didn't work and I had to change my style, is that you know when you have a group of people thinking about a specific domain that's always you know when you few heads together will come up with better solutions than just 1 person will, right? So I had to rely on them and trust them to come up with solutions that a lot of times I wouldn't have thought of myself, right? However, at the same time I had to objectively measure and judge those ideas and those suggestions. Are they good or are they not? You know, are there obvious pitfalls here that I've seen play out in the past that if we go down this route will obviously happen Or is it 1 of those things, hey, let's give it some latitude here.

Maybe it'll go poorly, maybe it won't, but the learnings are worth it. So within time, you start getting some raps at that, but that's 1 of those things that I had, nobody took the time, Angie, in the very beginning to explain that to me. And it's very tricky. I think you're absolutely right. That micromanaging, but also coaching, it is a really fine line.

Speaker 0: It's a delicate balance, yeah. But I like also what you said about how when done right, it allows your team members to be able to take like manageable, manageable or like calculated risks that like makes the product better in general. So how do you make it safe for your team members to do so?

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Here's 1 of the things I had to learn. You learn from failure. I, the reason why I became a competent engineer over time back when I was an engineer was because I made tons of mistakes and I learned from them, right? And now there are some obvious pitfalls that I didn't have to fall into anymore because I have some experience to rely on, right?

But somebody had to make it okay for me to fail because Had I gotten fired the first time I made a mistake, I would have never been able to learn upon it and then keep explaining that knowledge, right? So I didn't appreciate that enough at the time. And now as a leader, I do. I welcome calculated failure, right? Calculated risks, because the learning is typically worth it.

Now, the key word here is calculated. You don't want to make a mistake that's going to cost more than the company can afford or, you know, I mean, you have to be able to, as a leader, you have to be able to calculate that risk. But as long as it's within that acceptable range, you have to give people latitude to try and make mistakes. You know, so again, how do you make it safe? Well, if your team is constantly afraid that the moment they make the first mistake you're going to fire them or you're going to yell at them or you're going to...

Here's what I've learned. What you reward as a leader gets repeated. So, right? So if you reward people when they make a mistake, but the learnings that come on the other side of it are a little gold mine, then they'll feel like it's okay for them to be experimenting and trying new things. As long as it's, again, aligned with where we want to go as a company or as a team, right?

But if you yell at them, if you threaten them and you do not reward that kind of behavior, then that'll lead into overly protecting their image, right, Or their reputation. And they'll lie when they make a mistake and they'll tell you that they didn't. Or they'll hide it or they'll try to fix it real fast before you realize it. And those aren't healthy behaviors. We're all human.

We're going to make mistakes. It's inevitable. So let's just accept that fact and make it okay and fun and literally reward them for it. And that those behaviors will keep being repeated.

Speaker 0: Yeah, that's a really good point. And it sounds like what you're saying is that it's important to establish psychological safety in a variety of contexts, not just when people are making mistakes so that when they do make mistakes, they feel safe enough to like, be honest about it and talk about it and figure out how to move forward from it. Right. But I'm wondering, so when people aren't making mistakes, are there ways that you can still proactively promote psychological safety?

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So I have a pretty unique way of leading people. Maybe it's not all that unique, but I just think about it this way. I lead the whole person. It's not just a 9 to 5, you know, version of them.

It's not just the engineer, right? Or that engineering manager and the skills that they bring to the table. Because the reality is if they're having a hard time at home, if they're having a hard time, you know, I don't know, if they have a sick child or maybe their pet is not doing so well, that inevitably will impact the quality of their work because they're trying to be focused, they're trying to be here, but on the back of their mind, there's all those problems going on, right? So what I try to do as a leader, I make it okay for us to talk about those things. You know, I won't, I'll always respect their boundaries, right?

So if they just don't want to go there, if they're not ready to talk about it, hey that's totally fine. But by and large, I really try to make it okay for us to talk about things that are good in our lives and things that are challenging in our lives right now. And then, and then, I try to make it okay for them to talk to each other about it. Right? So I try to establish, it's funny, so my team, we have this thing where we meet every week and we have a connect where we just it's not the place where we're talking about hard skills engineering.

We get in there just to sometimes I'll give some updates on what's going on around the business right in the very beginning but then we'll just talk about hey how's your week going what's going on right Some people like to call it the feelings meeting. I don't know how it became the feelings meeting, Andrew. It's clearly called an engineering connect, but somehow they started nicknaming it feelings meeting, but it's true. It's okay to talk about your feelings and nerves. There's something that's bugging you, be it at work or at home.

Now, hey, there's still, this is still a workplace, right? It's still professional. So have some good people, smart, just to not overshare, you know. Don't make it weird, right? And I'll pull them aside later and I'll tell them, hey, like, that was weird.

Don't talk about that, you know. But, but by and large, when you start encouraging it to be OK to be human in the workplace, you know, gosh, they'll, they'll bring it their all, and I've seen it. And they'll start helping each other through that. And they'll learn what some of the cues are. Oh, that person's stressed right now.

Hey, let me give them a little bit of encouragement, right? Like things like that, they'll kind of start self-organizing and it becomes the culture of the team and amazing things happen when you have a healthy culture and there's good psychological safety. Tons of papers written about that. It's great.

Speaker 0: That sounds really amazing. I do like how like this feelings meeting seems to foster like implicitly this culture of trust and openness. And it helps people feel accepted for who they are so that when you do reach like moments of stress or crises, it's easier for people to like just naturally band together and help each other and accept and not blame each other, you know.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, my philosophy is this, if they feel safe and they have that courage to take risks, then they're going to take me places that I've never thought of even going. You know, if I make it okay for them to fail and make it okay for them to innovate and go to places we haven't gone before, my goodness, like the sky's the limit as to what we can produce, you know. So it does connect back to like, there's still a business reason behind it all, you know, like, like it, because again, because we are a business and we're trying to grow and, and, you know, and get into different turns. So like, it does connect back, but it does in such a fun way and you know with great levity and things like that.

But also again they create things and and create concepts that I wouldn't have never thought of myself if we were stuck in this command and control style of leadership where they only do what I tell them to do, you know? Like, gosh, these are brilliant, creative people. I think Steve Jobs used to say this, like, why would I hire super smart people and then keep telling them what to do? They need to be telling me what I need to do. And I'm a such a huge believer in that.

But the way you do that is by creating an environment where it is okay for them to take risks, fail, learn, innovate, and keep going.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And I think that's a really excellent point to close on. I think you've offered us so much wisdom today, both from yourself and then also from Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as well. So thank you for being here today and like telling us a little bit about like what the most important skill an engineering manager can have. And for everybody who's watching, thank you for being here with us today and check out Exponent at triexponent.com.

Bye everyone.

Speaker 2: Thanks so much for watching. Don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you. And of course, check out hundreds more videos just like this at triexponent.com. Thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview.

See all Exponent transcripts on Youtube

The MOST Important Engineering Manager Skills?