Make Specific Requests

As a director-level manager, you still need to have enough understanding of the technology in your organization to make specific requests without distracting the senior engineers with questions. By knowing enough about the progress of your teams, the projects, and bottlenecks, you can filter out technically infeasible ideas and map new initiatives onto ongoing projects. These specific requests should be used to keep the teams productive and balance technical risks with organizational goals. Here’s an example of how this works:

Your VP tells you that she wants to improve the search experience to grow active users by next quarter, and she can give you more engineers to do the work faster. You know the team can’t usefully add engineers to modify search because it’s in the process of being rewritten. Instead, you direct them to prioritize the work to expose the new API earlier so that the product team can finally run some of the tests they’ve been asking for. You explain what’s possible to the VP and make sure the team is focused on finishing work that can make those higher-level goals achievable.

Managers who don’t stay technical enough sometimes find themselves in the bad habit of acting as a go-between for senior management and their teams. Instead of filtering requests, they relay them to the team and then relay the team’s response back up to management. This is not a value-add role.