I’ve been digging into different ways to structure engineering teams a bit, and I like this take on the different roles of Engineering Managers and Engineering Leads:

It became obvious that in most cases it’s too much for one person to manage people (growth, performance and motivation), along with driving technical execution. At the same time, in most teams, we had one or more senior developers on whom Tech Lead could rely and delegate architecture decisions, quality, mentorship, etc… We decided to give these engineers roles to make them recognized in the company for their impact, also to improve communication channels, and to help team and product leads. We introduced the role of Engineering Lead to have a major influence on how we build products. Additionally, we replaced the Tech Lead role with the Engineering Manager role, which gave more focus on people and team management (“who”).

It also reminded me of Lara Hogan’s excellent post on how Engineering Managers and Engineering Leads work with Product: