We have about 90 engineers & 20 products people within our product development organization. Part of those 90 engineers include 15 engineering managers.<p>As we scale, their role has been shifting from “tech lead + people manager” (because they’re all technical and most of them were previously tech leads) to “mostly people management” because the number of reports they have is growing to 6-8 and it’s hard to expect from them to do great on both the people & tech leadership sides at the same time.<p>However, some engineering managers are getting bored doing “only” people management (incl. hiring, 1:1s, making the team functional, team rituals, being accountable for the team productivity, etc…) and would like to have “more” ownership/scope.<p>What have you done on your side? How do you support their growth as (senior) engineering manager without only providing them “more teams/reports”? What scope could they own and how do we make sure it doesn’t take over Product Management?
This looks like the age-old issue in technical teams: Some people are 'made' managers when they actually don't really want to do that job (and often they also are not very good at it).<p>In my view, the overwhelming aim is to have good managers, not to try to dilute the job in order to placate managers who don't really want to do management.<p>One standard solution to avoid people thinking that they have to go into management to grow, it to provide a technical development path that provides status and money (so-called dual career ladder).