Engineering Management
Progression Framework
Principles of Engineering Management at FirstPort
Engineering Managers at FirstPort focus on building the environments to support our engineers
As a technology business we have product engineering teams who build things that help the company hit its goals. This means we need environments where teams, and individuals within teams, can do great work, feel productive, and supported.
It’s hard and expensive to hire great people and change systems, so part of your role is to find the right balance between short-term gains and longer term sustainability, through the engineering processes and technology we’re using. We don’t want to reach a point where we may hit short-term goals but burn people out, or make poor tech choices which compromise our quality or product into the future – this is counter productive for the business in the medium to long term.
As an Engineering Manager at FirstPort your focus is on building those environments within our teams and our communities, as well as more directly supporting the people you’re line managing.
Engineering Management isn’t a promotion, it’s a path alongside Engineering
You can work as an engineer at FirstPort and then convert over to being a manager. Most likely this would be Mid 2/Senior engineer > Associate Engineering Manager. At the start of someone’s switch things will be most blurry - they may be essentially working as an engineer but have taken on a report, or may be working as an Associate but still be contributing to team delivery.
We also support people switching back to Engineering (whether reasonably soon after trying out manager responsibilities, or a lot later), but we’d recommend you commit to at least 1-2 years in a management role. It takes time to build relationships and learn how to be a great manager, which isn’t really possible to do over a few months.
Both Engineering Manager and Engineer roles fall under the “Engineering” banner at FirstPort, but management should be considered one career path, whilst working as an engineer is another. Changing to management shouldn’t be seen as a promotion; you’re instead taking on and learning new and different responsibilities (which you may not automatically be good at even if you’re a great engineer!).
There isn’t a single view of what good looks like for Engineering Managers
There are many approaches to leadership, and we encourage people to lead in different ways. What’s important is that EMs invest in understanding their style, know how to flex it when needed, understand that their sphere of influence may be considerable, and appreciate that they have a responsibility to lead positively.
We try to hire on diverse and clear strengths. Some people may have very varied backgrounds on their path to management, and may bring us different things.
We support and encourage managers who still want to code, but you should be mindful this probably shouldn’t be in the critical path (so as not to become a bottleneck with your other types of work). Also, as you reach Senior Engineering Manager and above it’ll probably be very difficult to do even this with all of your other responsibilities. However, as long as you’re able to do a great job on the core expectations of your role, we wouldn’t ever stop you coding if this was bringing us benefits, and we’d still expect everyone to keep their technical knowledge relevant through other means. If you’re keen to keep your hands-on skills really sharp you may instead want to discuss what an arc back into an Engineering role could look like for you after a couple of years, rather than continuing on the Management path longer term.
To help illustrate this, here are some examples of how profiles could vary...
Engineering major, management minor
Mostly works as an engineer and is levelled as such, but uses the AEM or EM level as a guide for their management responsibilities. This is usually a transitory phase. From here people usually move either further into management or revert back to an individual contributor role
People-centric
May have come to the EM role from a development-adjacent background, or prefers focusing on line management, people, process, and team effectiveness of engineers rather than hands-on coding. Would follow the EM framework
New manager
New to management, gradually learning the skills and picking up more direct reports, focusing solely on the AEM level of the framework rather than engineering work
Your focus will be a mix of people, process, and technical decision making
Prioritisation as an engineering manager can be incredibly challenging, and there are a lot of different behaviours on the framework below. It can be helpful to try and focus on the key purpose of your role to help you make prioritisation decisions about how you use your time. Your main focuses will be:
• Make sure the great people we currently have understand our strategy, are motivated, engaged and able to work sustainably without being burnt out. They should feel able to make valuable contributions in their team, feel safe, included and fairly rewarded so they stay with us for the long term.
• Help us hire great people to grow our team, and onboard them.
• Manage rare cases where individuals’ situations, behaviour, or performance might disrupt teams, to make sure our wider team is not impacted.
1️⃣ To make sure we have motivated, productive, psychologically safe people in our teams
Your focus will be a mix of people, process, and technical decision making
2️⃣ Represent engineering to help your team(s) with their processes, quality, and delivery
3️⃣ Support and enable technical decision-making
• Work with the engineers on the ways of working and processes that underpin the quality and delivery of work.
• Make sure engineering updates, work, and progress, are shared with stakeholders and anyone else in the business who is interested.
• Make sure engineers on the team have the right level of communication with other disciplines or teams they need to be coordinating with.
• Celebrate wins and encourage others to celebrate inside and outside the team!
• Help us make sure we’re making decisions and prioritisation around systems and technical investments so that we can deliver to the right level of technical quality; balancing new product work with maintenance and investments. This will help us deliver maintainable, resilient systems efficiently over the longer-term.
• You’ll work closely with our engineers. An antipattern is if you as the manager are making all of the key technical decisions. Instead you should be supporting and enabling others, but be able to help decision-making when needed.
• Our approach here can also strongly contribute to engineer and team satisfaction and retention.
As your scope and sphere of influence increases, you’ll become more senior
The main differences between the levels on the framework are that the scope of challenges and responsibilities increase with your level. If you combine this scope with the focus areas on the previous slide can extrapolate what you need to be doing at each level.
For example:
An Associate Engineering Manager will work 1:1 with their direct reports to protect them from burnout.
For a Senior Engineering Manager, protecting against burnout could mean not only working with direct reports for their benefit, but also coaching them to support their reports, making sure that 2+ teams are well staffed, motivated and productive, making great technical decisions, and being visible in their communications to influence others on this topic.
The Engineering Management Progression Framework
Introducing our Engineering Management Progression Framework
✏️ We use this to have shared expectations around what we expect of Engineering Managers at different levels�It’ll help people in planning their career growth, will act as a communication aid between individuals and their managers, and will also help folks to give appropriate feedback during reviews. We’ll also use it more widely, for things like assessing candidates’ seniority as part of our hiring process, and making salary offers at fair levels.
📊 This document aims to help us describe what’s expected at different levels�Each level comes with a description, and an illustration of the type of behaviours, impact, and skills we think are reflective of someone at that level, but importantly, it’s not an exhaustive checklist.��For each level we’ve intentionally focused on common examples that we think can apply to any Engineering Manager at FirstPort, but they’re not intended as an finite list of everything a great manager could do or be. You’ll almost certainly be doing important things that aren’t in the framework. There are many ‘shapes’ of managers, and we’ll aim to celebrate people’s different strengths whilst also aiming for fairness and clarity through our core expectations.
How you do it
What you do
Parts of the framework
Solving problems, working on projects, and building a strong, positive and inclusive culture within Engineering.
🧩 Engineering Community
Your ability to maximise the impact you have – making sure you’re tackling the most important problems at each level, in the right way, to a sufficiently high standard.
👩🏽💻 Impact & outcomes
Coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring your direct reports, and eventually influencing through indirect line management.
👥 Line management
Working with a team (or set of teams) to build things that helps the company hit its goals.
🛠 Teams & technology
Developing your leadership, communication, and values to best support those around you.
💛 Behaviours
Associate Engineering Manager
You’re focusing on learning how to manage
You’re at the start of your management journey, learning a new craft, and testing the water. During your time at this level you’ll try to build up your exposure to different aspects of management.
You could be someone who wants to focus purely on learning management, but it’s also possible you’re mainly an engineer who’s still focused on delivering for the team as well as taking on the line management of some people. If so, you may still be using the Engineering Progression Framework to guide your engineering progression, and will use this Framework to guide you through your management responsibilities.
During your time at this level we’ll have conversations about where you want to go from here. You may wish to progress towards the Engineering Manager level, or you could come into this role with the planned intention to switch back over to the Engineering framework.
⏱ Everyone’s different, but as a guide we’d expect someone to take around 1 to 2 years to progress through this level.��🔢 We’d expect you to be capable of managing 1-5 engineers at this point.��🎽 As a manager you’ll likely be focused on working with individuals, and learning how to contribute to a team
Associate Engineering Manager
👩🏽💻 Impact
• Build up your manager toolkit and experiences so you can feel confident handling a wider range of situations.
• Build your confidence and experience in coaching, mentoring, and helping develop your engineering direct reports through 1:1s, performance reviews and regular feedback.
• You probably still contribute meaningfully to your team through code, architecture, or tech leading, and balance this with your management responsibilities.
👥 Line management
• Manage 1-3 people initially, but build up confidence you can manage around 5.
• Learn about and use our management practices, including regular 1:1s, giving and receiving feedback, coaching, goal setting, having career conversations.
• Find your direct reports opportunities to learn, hit goals, and grow.
🛠 Teams & technology
• Work with engineers in your team to help solve problems and unblock them.
• Support junior engineers over their first 6-12 months to help them become self-sufficient.
• Represent hiring needs for your team, and work with other EMs/PMs to find solutions.
• Support your team with defining and hitting goals, inspiring and bringing the engineers on a journey where needed.
• Contribute to team discovery, prioritisation, and planning. You’ll do this through asking probing questions, challenging positively, encouraging others to participate, and contributing towards better technical solutions.
Associate Engineering Manager
• Learn and practice how to have more difficult conversations around topics like performance, and giving useful feedback.
• Demonstrate sensitivity and confidentiality when knowing private details around people’s salaries and personal lives.
• Work on understanding and breaking down biases in yourself.
• Work on establishing boundaries and resilience as a manager (putting on your own oxygen mask first).
• Form a sense of your style of leadership and superpowers.
• Build strong relationships with the Product Manager and other important people in and around your team.
💛 Behaviours
• Build up a strong peer network with other Engineering and Product Managers.
• Contribute thoughts on projects or improvements when asked for feedback.
• Participate in the Engineering and EM communities.
• Shadow, or otherwise involve yourself in engineering and EM hiring processes.
• Look for, and share opportunities to make Engineering at FirstPort better, then work with others to make them happen.
🧩 Engineering Community
Engineering Manager
Your focus is on people management and contributing at a team level
Having built up your foundational skills and confidence, you’re now a proficient manager and leader who’s equipped to tackle any line management or team situation that comes up. You’re also looking for opportunities to propose or be involved in wider projects to improve the Engineering or EM communities.
You still work embedded in a team, but if you’re choosing to code it’s not on the critical path towards team goals. Instead, you’re focusing most of your time on people and supporting the team through systemic improvements to set engineering up for success.
⏱ Everyone’s different, but as a guide we’d expect someone to take around 3 years to progress through this level.��🔢 We’d expect you to be capable of managing 6-10 engineers at this point.��🎽 As a manager you’ll likely be focused on having an impact through line management, and acting as an engineering leader for your team
Engineering Manager
👩🏽💻 Impact
👥 Line management
🛠 Teams & technology
• Coach, mentor, and help your direct reports to grow as engineers through 1:1s, performance reviews and regular feedback. You’ll be getting great feedback both upwards and from the people around you.
• Support your team (including helping them to have the right balance and priorities when it comes to engineering improvements and product work).
• Bring about resolution to more challenging interpersonal or performance issues, either with individuals, or in teams.
• Demonstrate you’re able to tackle a wide range of manager experiences confidently, even if you haven’t experienced them before.
• Typically manage 5-8 people, but work up to having the skills and toolkit to be able to manage up to 10 if needed.
• Show you’re able to manage a wide range of levels of engineers, including at a higher level of engineering than you reached yourself.
• Work with engineers to identify opportunities to improve engineering practices and processes
• Plan and deliver engineering or process improvement projects in your team (e.g. technical estimation sessions, writing effective technical proposals)
• Build culture, morale, and psychological safety around engineering in your team.
• Define and improve engineering standards in your team.
• Understand what makes a high performing team, and individually contribute to moving towards this for yours.
• Independently plan team changes and carry them out, including identifying needs, defining roles, managing team size and skillset balance.
Engineering Manager
• Plan and deliver smaller engineering or management improvement projects, or larger ones as part of a team (e.g. work with the People team to represent an Engineering view for improving the performance review process, bring in Architecture Decision Records)
• Lead stages of the engineer and EM hiring processes.
• Work to break down biases, promote and improve intersectional diversity and inclusion within the team
🧩 Engineering Community
💛 Behaviours
• Be able to get buy in at a team level when you find things that could be better (both technical or otherwise).
• Prioritise your time effectively, and ask for any help that you need.
• Work with engineers to uphold technical standards at a team level.
• Work with the PM and more senior engineers to set technical strategy for your team.
• Help the team understand how their work relates to the wider business goals.
• Work across teams with other managers/engineers to solve problems when needed.
• Lead and operate well even at times of ambiguity or uncertainty
• Be responsible for morale across engineers in your team.
• On top of the close relationships you’ve built with the people you work with, work to build relationships with wider people relevant to your team (e.g. Operations folk).
Senior Engineering Manager
Your focus is on helping to drive your team(s) and the wider community forward
Moving beyond having impact directly, you’re now about being more strategic, solving problems at a wider systemic level, and working through others.
Your situation may vary depending on our team structure and needs, but you’d typically work across a problem space that spans around 2 teams, supporting and leading engineering in a joined-up way. This may involve managing other managers who’d work more directly in one of the teams.
At this point you’re unlikely to be coding with any kind of regularity (purely because your responsibilities, scope, and scale have expanded!).
⏱ At this level your journey becomes incredibly individual and your progression opportunities will be tied to the business, but we’d expect someone to take around 3 years to progress through this level.��🔢 We’d expect you to be capable of managing 10-20 direct and indirect reports including engineers and other managers.��🎽 As a manager you’ll likely be focused on having an impact through making more systemic changes to benefit the individuals and teams (around 2) you work with.
Senior Engineering Manager
👩🏽💻 Impact
👥 Line management
🛠 Teams & technology
• Support your people and teams through making wider improvements at a systemic level, rather than just solving individual issues.
• Be capable of creating change, running and delivering initiatives that bring benefits to a set or teams or section of the company.
• Make a difference to your team(s)’s ways of working, effectiveness, culture, and engineering output.
• Be capable of managing between 10-20 people (including indirectly) if needed, but you’ll typically have a lower number of direct reports (ideally around 5) to help you have more time to focus on higher level and strategic work.
• Manage managers as and when this is needed.
• Sponsor and mentor people outside your immediate line management.
• Help to develop other (especially more junior) managers.
• Demonstrate you have the skills and experience to manage effectively across multiple teams, working through others where needed (to not try to be everywhere all at once!).
• Lead on setting strategic engineering direction for your set of teams.
• Lead and deliver larger engineering improvement projects (e.g. technical roadmap to improve business continuity, observability strategy and rollout).
• Influence the performance of your team(s) through more systemic changes (e.g. building a culture of psychological safety, improve systems resilience through advocating for technical improvements).
Senior Engineering Manager
• Lead larger engineering management improvement projects (e.g.pitching and running an internship programme)
• Act as the hiring manager across the lifecycle for different types of engineering roles.
• Make improvements to stages of the engineer and engineering manager hiring processes.
• Work to break down biases, promoting and improving intersectional diversity and inclusion through systemic improvements to the Engineering community.
• Share your knowledge and resources to help other EM become better managers.
🧩 Engineering Community
💛 Behaviours
• Make sure your teams have a clear sense of their direction, vision, and strategy, and people are excited about where we’re going.
• Role model leadership behaviours, and help others to develop their own leadership through this.
• Build a positive, inclusive, and supportive culture within Engineering.
• Give others confidence you can be relied on to handle unforeseen issues or emergencies of different kinds.
• Communicate effectively on a wide scale, including with more challenging, controversial, or sensitive messages.
• Get people excited to work here by promoting our products and culture, and representing us in writing, speaking or other ways.
• Attract, or be a reason why talented engineers and managers want to work here.
• Find ways to solve problems, rather than expecting others to solve them for you.
• Know when to bring together different functions (including external parties) to solve tricky problems, and help make these meetings or initiatives effective.
• Actively work to build relationships with other senior members of FirstPort across different communities.
Head of Engineering
You’re leading Engineering across the whole of FirstPort
At this level you’re part of the company’s leadership team, and build the culture and systems around engineering in the widest sense.
You make sure we have a highly motivated, skilled, and supported team of Engineers and Engineering Managers, who create high-quality, robust, and scalable technology which supports the business in meeting its goals.
⏱ There isn’t a clear progression path beyond this role, and there aren’t specific timescales you should expect!��🔢 We’d expect you to be capable of managing the entire engineering organisation (through direct and indirect management)��🎽 Your responsibilities will span our Engineering and EM communities, all of our existing product engineering teams, and planning new ones for the future.
Head of Engineering
• Manage everyone in engineering (all engineers and engineering managers) through direct and indirect reports.
• Work closely with other members of the company Leadership Team to develop FirstPort’s technology strategy in line with business goals, so that we have an approach to engineering and technology that’s fit for purpose.
• Give the business confidence in our approach to technology selection and procurement decisions.
• Lead on making sure we have confidence in our systems’ health, resilience, and performance.
👩🏽💻 Impact
👥 Line management
• Understand and mitigate against risk connected to engineering.
• Make sure that the output from our engineers is of a high quality and at an appropriate delivery pace (so we deliver well, but don’t burn people out).
• Build an environment where our engineers and engineering managers are highly motivated, skilled, supported, and positively challenged.
Head of Engineering
🛠 Teams & technology
🧩 Engineering Community
💛 Behaviours
• Plan ahead to define the teams, people, and budgets we’ll need to hit business goals for at least the next 12 months, with a strategic view of longer than this.
• Contribute to high-level prioritisation decisions around our product and technical initiatives.
• Promote best practices and set out our expectations around engineering and technology.
• Help teams to maintain a balance between building sustainable, resilient, high-impact and high-quality products, and shipping things quickly.
• Work not only across the Engineering community, but also with other areas of the business, for example collaborating with:
• the People team to define engineering hiring processes, attract, hire, onboard, and retain a diverse set of high potential engineers and managers.
• the People team to ensure we have the best people-centric processes.
• the wider product organisation (product, design, research, data) to help our product teams do fantastic, industry defining work.
• Make sure the engineering organisation has a clear sense of our direction, vision, and strategy, and people are excited about where we’re going.
• Work to create a strong, positive, and inclusive engineering culture, where the community feels a good sense of psychological safety.
• Your leadership is a major reason why people are drawn to work for FirstPort.
• Act as a representative to promote FirstPort externally.
• Contribute to the success of the leadership team at FirstPort.
🔜 Engineering Director
A highly strategic role, leading engineering across a section of the company
Right now we’re not big enough to have need for this level, but it’s likely that it’ll come in once we establish more teams.
You’ll be responsible for the engineering strategy and output within your area, but will work closely with the rest of the EM community to make sure we’re not siloed in our ways of working.
There’ll be some degree of problem solving for today, but you’ll spend a considerable amount of your time thinking about and planning for the future.
⏱ Your progression opportunities will be heavily tied to the business at this point, and you may stay at this level once it’s reached.��🔢 We’d expect you to be capable of managing 20-40 direct and indirect reports including engineers and other managers.��🎽 As a manager you’ll likely be leading engineering across a problem space that spans around 4+ teams
🔜 Engineering Director
👩🏽💻 Impact
👥 Line management
🛠 Teams & technology
• Be responsible for the technical quality, output, culture, systems health, and engineering delivery across your set of teams, or area.
• Be capable of line managing people across an entire area of the business (around 20-60 people including indirectly). You’ll typically have a lower number of direct reports (around 5) to help you have more time to focus on more strategic work.
• Coach and develop other (including more senior) engineering managers to help create a great working environment and engineering culture of excellence for the whole engineering team.
• Have the skills and experience to lead engineering across an area of the business.
• Contribute to setting strategic direction for your set of teams.
• Influence the performance of your area through more systemic changes.
• Plan ahead to define the teams and people we’ll need to deliver the roadmap and hit goals in your area.
🔜 Engineering Director
• Lead and deliver larger engineering improvement projects that benefit multiple areas of the business, or the whole community (e.g. owning an engineering hiring overhaul, creation and roll out of a technology decision-making framework)
• Contribute to the strategy for Engineering.
• Contribute to the strategy for Engineering Management, and management more widely at FirstPort.
• Manage relationships with external parties (e.g. our hosting providers)
🧩 Engineering Community
💛 Behaviours
• Make sure your part of the business has a clear sense of both its technical and overall company direction, vision, and strategy, and make people excited about where we’re going.
• Attract other very senior hires, and sell FirstPort as part of the hiring process.
• Sponsor and mentor other more senior EMs, ideally helping them to grow their influence and network outside of FirstPort.
• Help FirstPort become more respected in the wider technical community (like finding opportunities for the team to make their work public, speaking to large audiences, sharing knowledge).
• Lead change when you see a need, without anyone asking you to.
• Maintain high quality and standards company-wide, by championing our standards and principles and helping others to learn about them.
• Work to build relationships with people in your area of the business (engineering and non-engineering alike), as well as at a company leadership level.
• Work to keep your technical knowledge up to date, staying in touch with trends and future directions.
Executive role
There’s a theoretical path to being on the Executive team, but it would depend on company needs (whether there’s a role in the first place), and it’s also likely we’d run a competitive process with internal and external candidates. So it could be part of your path, but you shouldn’t see it as a natural part of progression.