A very common problem that managers at all levels face is the challenge of changing product and business roadmaps. Especially in smaller companies, it’s hard to get people to commit a year in advance to the work that will be done for the next year. Even at big companies, changes in the market can lead to sudden-seeming shifts in strategy that cause projects to be abandoned and planned work to be cancelled.
This is really hard for engineering managers to deal with. Changes in strategy are where being stuck in “middle management” feels the most unpleasant. You may have very little ability to push back on the changes to strategy coming from above, and even when you’ve promised your team that certain projects will happen, you sometimes have to pull back on that promise because of unexpected changes. This makes the team unhappy, and they complain to you. Because you have no ability to do much about it, you can feel like it exposes you as powerless, and your team might feel that they’re being treated not as humans, but as cogs in the corporate machine.
Coming into play here is a secondary challenge: how do you make the time for your team to deal with technical debt and other engineering-focused projects when there doesn’t seem to be a clear process for prioritizing that work? After all, if you don’t put any time into dealing with the technical issues themselves, your team’s ability to do product features will slow down. And yet the product team will never have technical debt on their roadmap, so the planning process often means there is no time allotted for this type of work.