How Hands-On Should a Tech Manager Be?

I have debated this with myself over years and my thoughts on this have evolved significantly as I transitioned from an individual contributor to leading a team of 20+ people, including both ICs and managers.

This topic often comes up in discussions with friends and colleagues across various roles.

Each person brings a unique perspective, often influenced by their own specific role and the level of visibility they have into the broader ecosystem. Visibility into the big picture is also a function of the role by the way.

Anyway, before I dive into what I think on this topic, let’s understand the difference between being technical and being hands-on, which are assumed to be the same thing, but they are not. Understanding this would be critical to grasp what I have to say 🙂

• Staying Technical means keeping up-to-date with the technologies your team uses, even if you're not hands-on. It involves continuous learning, understanding your tech stack, and effectively communicating with your team. This knowledge helps you make strategic decisions, contribute to problem-solving, and build credibility.
• Being Hands-On means actively engaging in technical work, such as coding or building systems, and working directly with technology. It involves diving into the technical details, participating in the creation and implementation of solutions, and staying deeply involved in the day-to-day technical tasks of your team. This approach helps you maintain technical proficiency, ensuring you stay connected to the core work and lead by example.

I truly believe that no matter what role you are in, if you are in tech company, you should stay “Technical” not only to be more effective in your job but also to earn respect from the team. I would even say that technical expertise should increase with more experience, as your knowledge widens with your role.

Being hands-on is a debatable and depends on many things including your personal preference, the size of the company and your team etc.

There are always two camps,

• Delegators' Advocates: Some believe that a manager’s primary focus should be on their team, advocating for delegating all technical responsibilities to engineers. They argue that this allows managers to nurture their team's growth, address concerns, and ensure overall team well-being.
• Hands-On Advocates: Others argue that managers should remain hands-on to lead engineers effectively. They believe that without technical involvement, managers risk losing credibility and the ability to provide practical guidance, ultimately becoming ineffective in their roles.

This is how I think it progresses (or it should progress, especially on the technical part). You can see the decline in hands-on. Obviously, this is a not a general rule and there could be exceptions but more often than not, I have seen this pattern even with people who want to stay hands-on, including me 🙂

And honestly speaking, this decline is not a bad thing as long as you are investing that time in things which create more impact and add more value to the organisation.

A leader’s job is not only providing technical solutions but also managing the well-being and growth of the team. It’s more complex when you have ICs and managers in your team as they both need to be managed differently because of their job description and expectations from their role.

So, what else will make you a good technical manager if you are not able to spend time being hands-on?

• Delegation: “Delegation isn't just about telling people what to do. It's about the delegation of responsibility whilst maintaining accountability.” ( I read this somewhere and put in my notes, but don’t have the source now. Not taking credit for this line 🙂).

Delegation is not easy. It is an art that requires experience and technical insight (see, I told we need to be technical for things apart from coding). It involves making judgment calls based on timelines and assessing who is best suited for the task within those constraints. Sometimes, it's about assigning tasks to less experienced team members who may take longer but will benefit from learning new skills, while providing opportunities for experts to mentor them. This approach not only ensures task completion but also fosters individual growth.

• Managers are accountable for the output of the organisation that reports to them. The responsibility of individual tasks is delegated to their direct reports and they mentor them and guide them in right direction.
• Managers should give more ownership to senior ICs for technical solutions because they are usually better than manager in core technical competencies. Manager’s job is not to compete with them, but to help them grow by giving more opportunities.
• Managers should focus on developer experience improving the speed of the execution.
• Manager’s core job is to unblock the team. It could be the lack of information or the lack of resources or direction.
• In my view, one of the most important and most underrated task that managers need to do is to represent the their team in bigger forums. That motivates the team.

In summary, good managers focus on what matters. It’s mostly about team growth but sometimes it means shielding them from un-necessary politics 🙂