What an Engineering Manager Needs to Bring
Leadership skills are not enough. You need to bring a set of tools that can unblock you team, make them productive at every step and help you manage the risks of building production ready software.
Bringing Value
As a software development manager, you are measured by your team’s ability to deliver software to users. To accomplish this, you must provide a working environment that makes your team as efficient as possible. This combination of processes and tooling removes barriers to creating, deploying, and debugging the software. This allows your team to deliver new features to users, gather their feedback, and fix bugs.
1. AI is Changing Everything
The software development world is changing. Just like when the internet started in the early 90s and with smart phones in the late 2000s, AI is ushering in a fundamental shift in how we build software. From my experiences in this new paradigm there is still a need for having good processes in place to make you team efficient and guard rails to help manage risks. Because of this I wanted to share the tools I’ve built up over the years and have adapted them to this new, fast passed, AI driven reality we are now in.
2. Join me for this journey
I’m building a community for engineering managers who want to lead with clarity, ship with confidence, and grow without the fluff. This is a space for hands-on leaders, new and seasoned, who are navigating the messy middle between code and strategy.
You’ll find real-world insights on hiring, performance, culture, delivery, and decision-making. No corporate-speak. No cults. Just practical tools, honest stories, and hard-earned lessons from the trenches of software development, DevOps and product engineering.
If you’ve ever had to justify a rewrite, coach a burned-out dev, push back on unrealistic deadlines, or negotiate a roadmap with product, this is your crew.
We’re here to trade notes, level up, and build engineering orgs that actually work.
3. I have opinions
I have lots of options, loosely held, that I’ve garnered from years of being in the trenches as an engineering manager, team lead and CTO.
I believe that each engineering manager needs to being a tools set: a CI/CD pipeline, Automated Tests, Centralized Logging and Exception Management, Feature Flags, Observability and an Easy-to-Use development environment. I’ll be adding to this newsletter on a regular basis as I see practical ways to help improve these within my own team and from others how have solved this problems.
