Engineering Manager

Purpose of the role

Engineering Managers are accountable for the software development and delivery for a number of teams within Product Development as well as all the pastoral care of the people who work in those teams.

About the role

Engineering Managers at Redgate are crucial to looking after and leading our development teams. They oversee multiple teams, ensuring they deliver valuable software to users that aligns with the company’s strategic goals.

Engineering Managers are experienced agile practitioners, helping teams to improve their agile and lean practices depending on their needs. This could involve running division-wide workshops or coaching teams and individuals around a specific technique.

An Engineering Manager will be consistently demonstrating most of the points below.

Skills

Leadership

  • Builds teams with a culture of empowerment through clear purpose, freedom to act and a drive to learn.
  • Models leadership behaviours for teams and other leaders.
  • Mentors technical leads in difficult team leadership situations.
  • Builds processes and practices across the product group to drive delivery, cooperation and continuous improvement.
  • Builds a vision for effective, empowered teams & agile product delivery and sets a strategic direction in service of that vision
  • Coordinates and collaborates with other divisional leaders and functions (coaching team, people team etc) to ensure their Tech Leads and teams get the support they need.

Mentorship

  • Applies different leadership styles depending on the person and task; able to direct, guide, support and coach depending on the person and the task.
  • Able to have open and honest discussions of their people’s performance. Gives constructive feedback and difficult feedback that lands well and drives improvement.
  • Actively develops their team members, giving them opportunities and motivation to improve and grow professionally.
  • Critical friend to other teams and engineering managers; curious in exploring work of peers and teams, confidently and tactfully offering coaching, advice and challenge as necessary.

Role-Specific

  • Wide range of coaching skills, including solution-focussed coaching, the taps model, performance coaching & career coaching.
  • Advocate of established and emerging agile and lean processes and practices.
  • Able to understand technical topics/issues/strategies, contribute to technical discussions at a high level, and report/represent these issues authentically to senior management and stakeholders.
  • Expert facilitator with extensive experience of leading planning, retrospective, review and collaborative decision-making meetings & workshops.
  • Confident talking about and supporting people with mental health difficulties.
  • Excellent people management skills and experience. Including flexible leadership, great 1-2-1s, managing performance and personal development planning.
  • Line manages individuals, including personal development and performance management.

Communication

  • Able to flex content and style to suit array of channels, from Slack & emails through to external blogs and presentations.
  • Able to give clear and engaging reports/presentations to product area/division to influence wider groups.
  • Able to build rapport and influence peers.
  • Adept at resolving conflict by facilitating constructive discussion.
  • Able to represent the product group at the divisional/company level, reporting with appropriate levels of detail.

Emotional Intelligence

  • Has a constructive relationship with all members of their team, based on trust and mutual respect. Knows their opinions, their strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations.
  • Is primarily concerned with their people’s well-being and is considerate of their feelings and needs.
  • Able to handle crucial conversations constructively and considerately.

Delivery

  • Able to guide teams in their work supporting product strategy, holding them accountable to their purpose, mission and any objectives set by the team.
  • Able to support teams with high-level decision-making, helping them to balance technical, commercial and product decisions within the group
  • Advocates high quality product development.
  • Able to demonstrate skills in planning, tracking, delegation, prioritisation, stakeholder management, risks/issues assessment, oversight, and review.
  • Able to apply change management techniques.
  • Initiates, manages and drives cross-team initiatives that deliver that help continually improve our approach to product development.

Business Knowledge

  • Demonstrates awareness of the commercial performance of our products and the company.
  • Understands and communicates company and divisional goals to their teams and line reports.
  • Interacts with stakeholders from across the business in order to provide insight and context for their teams from the wider company.
  • Demonstrates awareness of customer and market insights in their product area.