What is your role in the decision-making process for your team? Do you know? You may have a product manager who works with your team and owns the product roadmap, or the set of business features that your team has committed to working on. You probably have a tech lead who, as we covered in Chapter 3, is still deep in the technology but is also thinking about project management and the work that needs to be done. So where does that leave you, the engineering manager?
You have more responsibility than you may expect. While the product manager is responsible for the product roadmap, and the tech lead is responsible for the technical details, you are usually accountable for the team’s progress through each of these elements. The nature of leadership is that, while you may only have the authority to guide decisions rather than dictate them, you’ll still be judged by how well those decisions turn out.