Engineering Management at Memrise

James Salter
The Memrise Engineering Blog
6 min readFeb 23, 2021

On the back of sharing our Growth Framework for Individual Contributors in a previous post, I’m pleased to also share our definition of what an Engineering Manager does at Memrise.

Engineering Managers manage our engineering teams. They’re responsible for people management, the team’s delivery, designing and improving processes, and the team’s communication, internally and externally.

We only have one quite broad level for managers at Memrise. As we grow, we expect to add more levels.

As with the IC framework, these behaviours are universal, applying to managers regardless of the domain they’re managing in. This helps with alignment and creating a shared practice of great management.

Responsibilities of an Engineering Manager

People Management

Engineering Managers line manage our individual contributors, being responsible for their growth, effectiveness, recruitment, and retention.

  • Conducts regular 1:1s with all their reports. 1:1s should be used for support, coaching and mentoring, giving advice, unblocking things, improving clarity, and discussing creative technical and product ideas.
  • Helps engineers grow through active coaching and mentoring. The engineering manager should be actively working to identify points that could use improvement, based on our growth framework.
  • Runs hiring processes, customising the departmental process to their team and roles. The manager is accountable for the quality of the interview process and in turn, the quality of people hired into their team. Each hire should ratchet up the quality of our team, bit by bit.
  • Where someone is underperforming, either coaches them to success, or manages their exit.
  • Sets compensation for individuals in the team according to their performance, aligned to our growth framework.
  • Improves the department’s practice of people management by contributing ideas to our growth framework, definitions of roles, approach to performance management, technical culture, etc.
  • Provides constructive feedback to other managers about the performance of their reports.

Delivery

Engineering Managers ensure projects are delivered on time, with quality. It’s encouraged for delivery responsibilities to be delegated to tech leads and ICs, but the manager remains ultimately accountable for those delegated responsibilities being performed effectively.

  • Responsible for the timely delivery of projects the team is working on, ensuring the team clears all organisational and technical blockers.
  • Delegates delivery responsibilities to the team effectively, either appointing an overall technical lead for the team, and/or individual project leads.
  • Ensures the team represents their projects efficiently using appropriately configured tooling, such as ticketing systems, code review systems etc.
  • Ensures that the team works collaboratively and effectively towards clearly communicated goals, in conjunction with Technical Leads and Product Managers.
  • Works with Technical Leads and Product Managers to ensure that the team’s projects have a clear scope that is achievable within the given time constraints.
  • Helps coordinate the planning of efficient roadmaps with Technical Leads, Product and Program Managers.
  • Anticipates problems with delivery in advance and constructively flags them with stakeholders.
  • Actively plans ahead, in conjunction with stakeholders, forming a predictable delivery cadence that allows efficient scheduling of work.
  • Ensures that problems are not left hanging — problems that can be actioned by the team must be actioned, and those that can’t must find a clear owner elsewhere.

Process

Engineering Managers own the process of the team and its ways of working, clearly documenting them and continuously improving them.

  • Facilitates a process of continuous improvement through regular, actionable retrospectives. It’s encouraged to share the burden of running the retro with the team, but the manager is accountable for the quality of the retros, ensuring they engage with the important issues and producing highly quality actions which are followed up in a timely manner.
  • Guides the team to improve their performance by making adjustments to ways of working, based on observations of performance metrics and industry best practices.
  • Facilitates regular setting of engineering goals and ensures that the team works effectively towards those goals.
  • Defines the rituals of the team and how they are run, such as stand-ups, planning meetings, retrospectives, showcasing, learning time etc.
  • Works closely with product managers and stakeholders to define reliable processes for building a sustainable backlog of work.
  • Works with other Engineering Managers to improve departmental development processes.

Communication

Engineering Managers are excellent communicators, acting as facilitators internally and externally. Managers also coach the team to be effective communicators themselves. Ultimately, they should be working towards the goal of a team that communicates effectively without them in the loop.

  • Ensures the team communicates effectively with each other: peers should collaborate effectively, reach quick and clear understandings, and work together to achieve shared goals.
  • Ensures engineers communicate effectively with their non-technical peers: engineers should communicate clearly verbally and in written form, using widely understandable language.
  • Represents Memrise externally by attending meet-ups, publishing blog posts and giving talks, coaching the team to do the same.
  • Works to build trust and a collaborative partnership between engineers, designers and product managers.
  • Works with the product team to bring clarity to the team over high and low level product goals, their context and motivations. The team must know why it’s building things in order to build them well.
  • Ensures that constructive feedback from the team is clearly communicated, taken on board and actioned by the business.
  • Ensures that the team’s internal and external communication is undertaken respectfully, coaching and intervening if necessary.
  • Proactively shares knowledge of Engineering Management best practices with the other managers.

Culture

Engineering Managers are an exemplar of company culture. Managers should exhibit, evangelise and coach company values of Transparency, Respect, Ownership and Action (the topic of a future blog post!).

  • Cultivates a product-focused engineering culture, in which engineers have a deep understanding of our product and our customers, and leverage this knowledge effectively to contribute improvements to our user experience.
  • Enables innovation within the team, working to provide clarity and time for technical creativity that improves our products.
  • Ensures that the team approaches projects holistically, starting from the perspective of solving customer and business problems.
  • Contributes to Memrise technical culture through writing blog posts, giving presentations, organising internal events such as hack days, etc.

Technical

Engineering Managers are ultimately responsible for technical quality. As such, they are expected to be sufficiently technically involved to be able to validate the team’s technical approach makes sense for the business, to make technical suggestions, and to coach engineers on their approach to solving problems (particularly at lower levels). They’re also ultimately responsible for setting the team’s technical roadmap, so they need a keen understanding of the costs and benefits of technical investment projects in order to ensure the right work is being scheduled for the business.

Engineering Managers aren’t typically expected to directly write code or to be the origin of technical designs. These responsibilities are expected to be performed by individual contributors. The manager’s responsibility is to make sure the team has sufficiently high performing engineers for these tasks, and that they’re doing these things well.

In some teams, an Engineering Manager may act as a Technical Lead Manager, where the team is small and doesn’t otherwise have a Technical Lead. This means they take on the responsibilities of a Technical Lead as well as a manager, spending some proportion of time writing code and partnering with the product manager(s) to lead implementation of projects. This can work well for smaller teams (less than 4 people), but for larger teams it should be a temporary measure: being a key technical contributor requires lots of time and a predictable calendar, which we find doesn’t mix well with managing a team of 4+ people — it puts a lot of pressure on the manager, and having a senior contributor who is only partly available can bottleneck the team.

  • Guides the development and execution of the team’s technical strategy, supervising the setting of goals and execution towards meeting them.
  • Coaches engineers to become stronger engineers both personally and by facilitating peer to peer mentoring across engineering.
  • Validates that high quality technical designs are being produced.
  • Ensures that the team continuously improves our code and systems in a way that allows us to move faster, with more quality.
  • Helps the team focus on which technical issues are the most pressing.
  • Helps the team schedule technical investment work amongst other business critical work using a sustainable, predictable, well communicated process.

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