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roadmap updated 2026-06-01

Engineering Manager Roadmap

Transition from individual contributor to engineering leadership. Learn 1:1 management, hiring, performance coaching, technical roadmapping, OKR execution, and incident leadership for engineering teams.

Phase 1 — Beginner

Make the IC-to-manager mindset shift, establish effective 1:1s, and understand your new accountability for people and delivery.

JiraConfluenceSlackGoogle MeetLattice

Phase 2 — Intermediate

Lead hiring, manage performance, own team delivery, and develop technical strategy aligned with product and business goals.

JiraNotionLatticeWorkdayPagerDuty

Phase 3 — Advanced

Lead multiple teams or a department, set technical and organizational strategy, and develop other managers.

WorkdayCartaFigma (for org design)MiroRadford/Levels.fyi

The path: Beginner → Intermediate → Advanced

Beginner

Focus: Make the IC-to-manager mindset shift, establish effective 1:1s, and understand your new accountability for people and delivery.

Skills to build

  • IC-to-manager mindset shift: output through others, not self
  • Running effective 1:1 meetings with direct reports
  • Understanding team health signals and morale indicators
  • Basic project management: sprint planning and backlog grooming
  • Giving and receiving feedback using SBI or COIN frameworks
  • Understanding hiring process: job descriptions, leveling, interviews
  • Reading technical architecture proposals and asking good questions
  • Communicating delivery status and risks to stakeholders

Tools to learn

  • Jira
  • Confluence
  • Slack
  • Google Meet
  • Lattice
  • 15Five

Intermediate

Focus: Lead hiring, manage performance, own team delivery, and develop technical strategy aligned with product and business goals.

Skills to build

  • Structured hiring: scorecards, debrief facilitation, offer negotiation
  • Performance management: PIP design, coaching plans, promotions
  • Technical roadmapping: sequencing projects and managing dependencies
  • OKR setting: cascading objectives and key results for engineering teams
  • Incident leadership: coordinating response without micromanaging engineers
  • Team topology design: right-sizing and cross-functional collaboration
  • Delivery forecasting with velocity, risk identification, and escalation
  • Engineer growth: career ladders, development plans, and sponsorship

Tools to learn

  • Jira
  • Notion
  • Lattice
  • Workday
  • PagerDuty
  • LinearB
  • GitHub Insights

Advanced

Focus: Lead multiple teams or a department, set technical and organizational strategy, and develop other managers.

Skills to build

  • Manager of managers: developing and coaching engineering leads
  • Organizational design: team boundaries, ownership models, and interfaces
  • Executive communication: presenting technical strategy to non-technical stakeholders
  • Engineering culture building: values, norms, psychological safety
  • Budget management and headcount planning for engineering
  • Technical due diligence for acquisitions or partnerships
  • Long-range technical strategy (2-3 year horizon) and architecture governance
  • Engineering brand and recruiting pipeline for senior talent

Tools to learn

  • Workday
  • Carta
  • Figma (for org design)
  • Miro
  • Radford/Levels.fyi
  • Google Slides
  • Notion

Labs to practice

Interview questions to prepare

  1. How do you differentiate between a performance issue and a motivation issue with a direct report?
  2. Describe how you have built and scaled an engineering hiring process from scratch.
  3. How do you balance technical debt with feature delivery pressure from product?
  4. Walk me through how you’ve set team OKRs and ensured alignment with company strategy.
  5. How do you lead incident response when the engineering team is under pressure?
  6. Describe a time you had a difficult conversation with a direct report — how did you prepare and what was the outcome?
  7. How do you keep high performers engaged and prevent attrition on your team?
  8. How do you build psychological safety on an engineering team that has experienced blame culture?

Certification suggestions

  • Certified Scrum Master (CSM) — Scrum Alliance
  • Professional Scrum Master II (PSM II) — Scrum.org
  • Certified SAFe Agilist — Scaled Agile
  • ITIL 4 Foundation — DevOps School
  • Crucial Conversations Certification — VitalSmarts

See exam formats, costs and official links in the certification registry.

Free resources

Portfolio project ideas

  • Design a full hiring loop for a senior engineer role: job description, leveling rubric, interview scorecard, and debrief facilitation guide
  • Create a 6-month engineering team roadmap with OKRs, dependency mapping, and a risk register aligned to a product launch
  • Build a team health dashboard using LinearB or GitHub Insights tracking DORA metrics, PR cycle time, and on-call load
  • Write a technical strategy document for your team’s next 12 months: current state, desired state, key bets, and success metrics

Mistakes to avoid

  • Continuing to do IC work to feel productive — your impact is now measured through your team’s output, not your own commits
  • Avoiding difficult performance conversations until they become termination conversations — address issues early and specifically
  • Over-indexing on process (standups, retros, planning) without asking whether they create value for the team
  • Not delegating technical decisions — over-controlling architecture decisions prevents engineers from owning outcomes
  • Neglecting your own manager’s relationship — managing up effectively is just as important as managing down

Keep going