Your team is exhausted after 3 long weeks of work for the new release. The codebase is a complete mess, as you had to cut many corners to make it on time. The feature gate was opened only for 5% of users, but you already got some complaints, and a bug had a severe impact on one customer’s business. This quarter’s deadline is in a week, and to hit your objective, you need to open the feature for everyone ASAP.
What bothers you the most in the paragraph above? What would you fight for?
I’ve been thinking about that question a lot. What should be my one priority? Is it the team? The customers? The success of the company?
The following 4 archetypes are different based on the answer above. Each would fight for a different thing:
The Umbrella - for the exhausted team
The Crusader - for the single customer
The Gatekeeper - for technical excellence
The General - for the company goals
I created a short prompt you can run to check which fits you best based on your written conversations.
The Umbrella
In the opening scene, your exhausted team is what you’d care about.
You put the happiness and satisfaction of your direct reports first. You try to protect them from the noise and pressure of the organization. You fight for them, pushing for promotions, higher pay, and fewer working hours. Your top priority is your people, and you are willing to go a long way for them.
The result is that your people love and trust you. When you do need to ask something of them, they will follow your lead because they appreciate you.
But you usually avoid hard asks and hard decisions. When there is a tight deadline, you are hesitant to ask your team to work longer. When there is a critical bug on a Sunday, you will jump on it yourself instead of “bothering” someone. You might also struggle to set high standards for the team and let go of engineers who underperform.
Many first-time EMs fall into this archetype. When I first managed people 11 years ago, my own manager encouraged me to be the umbrella for my team, and it took me quite a while to see the harm in it.
Even today, a decade later, this is my biggest trap. I want to be an un-hateable engineering manager, and I need to constantly remind myself to fight those instincts.
The Crusader
You have strong beliefs about what is right, and you are willing to fight for it and put your reputation on the line. Your sense of justice is what guides you.
This is the archetype I ‘evolved’ to. My crusade was (and often still is) the pain of our customers. I really hate when company goals and metrics come before the feelings of real humans using the products I work on.
The upside of that approach is a strong connection with the business side of the company. Throughout the years, I’ve built good connections with customer success, sales, and support, because I fought for what our customers needed.
The downside is that sometimes you do need to make a hard decision, like sunsetting a feature that some customers use, or raising prices. If you make everything your crusade, you’ll burn bridges and not have a very good name at the org level. In addition, if every customer request becomes urgent and critical, your engineers will suffer too.
The General
You care about what gets measured and what the organization values. If you have an OKR/KPI you are responsible for, you are laser-focused on it. You want to win the war, and are willing to sacrifice for it:
Your people’s well-being
Individual customer problems
The technical foundation of the team (unless it’s tied to a metric)
The upside is clarity and alignment. You know what the organization rewards, and you try to move the team toward it. You are often the first to get promoted yourself, but you also get your team promoted because their work is visible and aligned to what leadership cares about.
But when the ‘score’ and value diverge, this can become theater: work created for a promotion package and not for any useful impact.
The Gatekeeper
You see it as your role to protect the technical standards of the team and the codebase. You protect them from pressure from PMs, outside demands, and even engineers whose work is not high quality enough.
You were probably a very strong engineer for many years, or even held an architect’s role.
The upside is that engineers improve and learn a lot under you. You have a lot to say about the technical side, people respect you as a technical source, and you have high technical standing in the company.
The downside is often a poor balance with business needs. You can lose pragmatism, work on something endlessly, and build toward an ideal instead of what the business needs right now.
Final words
The article is a reference to Hogwarts and the sorting hat (from Harry Potter, my favorite childhood book).
On your first day at the school, a magical hat sorts you into a ‘house’, based on your own values (by reading your thoughts). You have some choice and influence over it, but once done, it’s final. Each house corresponds roughly to one of the types above.
I believe that similarly, the company you choose often shapes the archetype of manager you become, and the management habits you build. The difference is that YOU are the one choosing which ‘house’ to grow in.
Of course, the real world is not as clean. All of us have parts from different archetypes and different times. None of them are really better or worse, the challenge is to somehow combine the best parts of each at the right moments.
Here’s my own output in the last few weeks:
What I enjoyed reading this week
Some great articles about EM archetypes already cover a bit different angles. I think I read most of them while researching for this one. Here are my 3 favorites:
Will Larson's engineering manager archetypes describe four basic role types based on scope: Tech Lead Manager, Team Manager, Group Manager, and Executive Manager.
Charity Majors' engineering manager archetypes and career paths adds more about career situations and inflection points (for example, “The manager who was forced into it and wants out…has wanted out for years” and “The engineer who wants to be a manager, but hasn’t had the opportunity”).
And Pat Kua's five archetypes describe the common ‘mix’ of what constitutes your workload - technical, people, process, and product responsibilities (product EM, delivery EM, etc).
