Ask HN: How do you support your engineering managers' growth?
As we scale, their role has been shifting from “tech lead + people manager” (because they’re all technical and most of them were previously tech leads) to “mostly people management” because the number of reports they have is growing to 6-8 and it’s hard to expect from them to do great on both the people & tech leadership sides at the same time.
However, some engineering managers are getting bored doing “only” people management (incl. hiring, 1:1s, making the team functional, team rituals, being accountable for the team productivity, etc…) and would like to have “more” ownership/scope.
What have you done on your side? How do you support their growth as (senior) engineering manager without only providing them “more teams/reports”? What scope could they own and how do we make sure it doesn’t take over Product Management?