As an engineering manager, you will help set the schedule for your team. As the larger organization tries to figure out what the plans for the quarter or year might look like, you’ll estimate whether your team can do certain projects, how much work those projects will be, and whether you have the right people to complete the work. You might be asked if your team can take on the support of old systems in addition to their current commitments, or how many people you’d need to hire in order to support a new initiative. The organization will expect you to be capable of doing both off-the-cuff estimation and more concrete project planning.
We gave a high-level overview of project management in Chapter 3’s discussion of being a tech lead, but now I want to dig into some of the advanced work. As the manager of a team, while you may push some of the project planning onto your tech leads, you’ll likely need to do some of that work yourself. You may have to decide which projects to take on, and when to push back on accepting projects. You’ll probably be asked for rough estimates as to when work will be done, even work that is planned and iterated on in an agile fashion.
You need to have a strong sense of the rhythms and pace of your team to manage their workload successfully, but fortunately there are some shortcuts that can help.