What I Wish I Knew as a First-Time Manager
A survival guide for the newly promoted and mildly panicked
Looking back to 2017, I can safely say I provided a terrible management experience for my team in my first engineering leadership position. I cancelled 1:1s, sidestepped difficult conversations, and empathy? Ha! I wouldn’t have recognised it if it slapped me round the head with a wet fish.
If you're anything like I was, you've been promoted into a role you’re completely unqualified for, with little or no training, and four or six people now mysteriously report to you.
Where do you start? And how do you not screw it up?
Start with expectations (yours, theirs, everyone’s)
Over the years, I’ve learned that engineering management looks completely different at every company. Hopefully you asked some hard questions before taking the role about what this company needs. But if not, start now.
What’s the priority here? Delivery? Technical direction? Team cohesion? Pastoral care? Herding cats?
The good news: your own manager can help. Have a proper conversation. Get clarity on your role from their perspective. Ask how your time justifies your salary.
Because here's the new reality: you’re probably not the most directly productive person on the team anymore (see my post on the new manager Identity Crisis for more on this delightful shift). Although meeting expectations is a useful baseline, this blog isn’t about doing the minimum, it’s about force multiplying.
Managing up
Your manager likely wore parts of your hat before you arrived, so your existence is probably a big relief to them.
Lean into that. Find out what they expect from you:
What does “good” look like in this role?
What updates do they need, and how often?
What can you take off their plate?
Do they like cheese?
That last one is worth knowing. Only sociopaths don’t like cheese.
Anyway, we all need to understand the environment in which we operate. Ask your manager for concrete expectations for your first 1, 3 and 6 months. If they don’t have them ready, offer to draft something together. This gives you much-needed direction before you’ve built enough context to set it yourself.
And by being proactive and hungry, you’ll set up the relationship for success from the outset.
Meet the team
As a functional introvert, this bit is always a wrench. You’re thrown into a group of strangers and expected to build meaningful, trusting relationships. :scream:
First, get clarity on who’s in your team. It’s amazing how often this is fuzzy in a matrix org. If you’re lucky they’ll introduce themselves. Once, having arrived at a new role for about 5 minutes, an unknown person came up to me and said, “You're my new manager”... “Am I? Oh right!”
More likely is that you’ll need to reach out, especially in our hybrid world. A quick Slack message to introduce yourself is a priority. Say you’re keen to learn about their story and experience so far.
This outreach primes them for your first session together, so they’re relaxed and mentally prepared. Let's try and avoid cringingly awkward.
Next, book the 1:1s. Ask two questions:
“Tell me about your journey. What brought you to be here right now?”
“What do you need from an engineering manager?”
The first one builds rapport. People love talking about themselves. Take notes that you can build on in later sessions. “Katie is an amateur taxidermist… Need to hear more about that one day.”
The second sets the tone. You’re here to serve. Don’t say, “Here’s what I need from you.” You’re not laying down the law. You’re inviting a dialogue.
Some people will have a clear ask: “I need support with career progression.” Others won’t know what they need, or what an engineering manager even does. Commonly, they’ve got low expectations after working with a really ____ manager (insert adjective of choice here).
That’s fine. You can offer a few examples: “I’m here to champion the team. To unblock blockers. To help us build something great and enjoy doing it.”
Keep it light. Don’t drop any dad jokes yet. All in good time.
Finally, ask for permission to set up a regular 1:1. Remember, you’re here to serve, and inspire.
Show off your technical chops (quietly)
You’re not just a manager—you’re an engineering manager. It’s important to demonstrate that early. Staying in touch with the tech is critical for me.
This doesn’t mean jumping into pull requests or rewriting the build system in Rust.
It means asking smart questions… and dumb questions that everyone else is thinking but too embarrassed to ask. Show curiosity. Listen deeply.
Ask about a subsystem’s performance. Request a walk-through of the architecture. Attend a technical deep dive and genuinely engage. Ideally, get someone to whiteboard the system for you. Redraw it later and ask where you got it wrong. Be vulnerable. Make mistakes.
Even if you’re not hands-on, get the dev environment working and run the project locally. Try shipping a trivial change or fixing a bug. This shows the team you care about their developer experience, and that quality and delivering matter to you.
You’re not here to be the best engineer (you’re not!). You’re here to show that you get it and you can talk the same language. I always love the shock on a team member's face when they see you use some bash history expansion shortcuts, “... but you’re just a manager?!” (true story).
Know a little about a lot
The value of an EM comes from breadth, not depth.
You don’t need to know everything about the system. That’s what your team is for. But you do need to understand how the tech, the people, the business, and the processes interact.
Your mission is to spot risks and connect dots others can’t see.
Try, Fail, Reflect, Repeat
As a first-time manager, your job is to listen. To learn. To earn trust. And to figure out where you can add value, with a healthy dose of patience.
You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to cancel 1:1s. You’re going to get slapped in the face by a fish-shaped empathy failure.
The trick is to reflect. To get better. And to show your team that you’re learning everyday.
If this piece hit close to home, you might like my Engineering Manager OS, a Notion template built to give managers the structure I wish I’d had when I started.