Engineering Strategy, Operational Excellence, Hiring, Distributed Applications, Native Apps
Curious to see that a team with 3 engineers was left out, however in my experience it plays a very important role in an organization. A team with 3 devs and a Lead is a good opportunity for an individual contributor to try out a leadership role, while still having a lot of hands-on impact and a way back if things don't work out. Why is it easier for a beginner lead though? As a permanent fixture, 3 devs + a hands-on lead is a tight and fast moving unit. It can be broken down into 2 frontend + 2 backend pairs or 2 android + 2 ios pairs, enabling a stable connection between people for Pull Requests, pairing sessions and a second opinion on a tech design. In terms of growth opportunities - four has a balanced aspect to it, enabling you to have two junior team members and two more experienced ones. The size of four also enables a generous bus factor for vacations, timezones and sicknesses, effortlessly covering a monthly on-call rotation with 4 week-long shifts. In case of a service team, it facilitates a 24-hour uninterrupted delivery/monitoring cycle of 8 hour-long shifts, with an extra spot reserved for shadowing/onboarding/offboarding/emergencies. Folks, when in doubt and need to develop a fresh leader - no way you can find a better setup than 3 + 1.
8 direct reports is the sweet spot for an engineering manager's team size. Organizational design is challenging. There are a lot of opinions about how many reports a manager should have. It's a difficult territory to navigate because feelings and anecdotal data do not help you design an organization well. Thankfully, there are people who went through it all multiple times and wrote down what they learned. I really enjoyed James Stanier's article on this as well as Will Larson's book "Engineering Management – An Elegant Puzzle" (links in the comments). From these, this is what I synthesize: 2 devs: - That's not a team. - You should code and join them. 4-6 devs: - That's a small team. - Allows for hands-on manager (Tech Lead) roles. 8 devs: - The sweet spot. - Allows for effective people management. - Allows for effectively driving initiatives as well. 12+ devs: - Your impact diminishes. - You work through delegation and coordination. - You should probably think about installing Team Leads. 20+ devs: - Impact reduced to minimum, gone or negative. - Time to add 1 or 2 managers. P.S. How's your day going? Hope you are well!
I write about management | Domain Engineering Lead PIM at Schwarz IT
10moLove the insight, Nikita. Thanks!