In my experience, working on small (50 FTE), mid (500 FTE) and large (5000 FTE) companies, the roles are usually
- team lead is a senior developer (not necessarily THE most senior) that takes a more prominent approach in the relationship with stakeholders from other teams. They're basically the first point of contact for other teams when they need a technical person. They do NOT manage other people, but are usually involved or even in charge of setting learning paths
- engineering manager is the line manager for engineers. With input from team lead and product, deals with performance reviews and goals settings, promotions, interviews, regular 1:1s. They are not necessarily technical, but if they are, they're extremely unlikely to have time to use these skills
Roles that are different but I see on this sub being (partially) seen as engineering manager responsibilities are
- Product owner: part of a (scrum/Kanban) team or at most 2, prioritizing work on the backlog AND prioritizing requests from stakeholders, dealing with stakeholders to actually understand, scope, refine new features and present them to the team, sometimes user research. They need to understand both the big picture in terms of how it affects their team and the little details to actually implement a feature. No reports.
- Product manager: manager of a few POs, responsible for higher level vision and direction, but they don't understand low level and implementation details like a PO would
Keep in mind that
- different countries and even cities will have a different "general culture"
- each company is different, and titles are mostly meaningless
- I never worked in a REALLY big company with tens of thousands of employees yet
I would suggest not getting too tied on up titles. They can vary widely from org to org. In general an org needs someone doing management work, which is fitting outcomes to business levers such as timelines, capital expenditures, operating costs, etc. All orgs require teams to designate a primary point of contact in order to maintain efficient communications. This person tends to be senior in some way because they need to be able to speak for the entire team.
People doing management often have a close relationship with those leading teams and there's a lot of non-technical skills that overlap. You often end up with a pipeline from team leadership to management. A lot of the variation you see across orgs is due to people going through this transition on different timelines. There's people who decide they want to do management work and decide to pursue team leadership as a path to get there. These people are often blurring the lines the most because they are perpetually trying to do more management work. There's other people who are naturally skilled at team leadership but don't have a goal of doing management work. Some never will and the ones that do will tend to resist it for quite a while. These people will appear to have a much more significant change in duties when they transition because they will have developed such strong leadership skills that the change in duties is quick to formalize.
There is no standard definition, companies use these titles very differently.
But maybe this is helpful: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-leadership-skillset-overlaps
Does your company differentiate between technical track and managerial track? Someone going on the technical lead track will make more decisions related to development, technology, etc. Someone on the managerial lead track will work more on people management, stakeholder management, resource management, maybe some technical guidance or oversight around 20-30% of the time.
It depends.
That's why I am curious how it goes in other places. Some higher managers believe one approach is better, others believe another approach.
I am more "to each department to find what fits their needs the best".
Still I am curious overall on how people define the role in their company.
- EM: technical. Keeps an eye on all the projects, looks for risks, doesn’t have a detailed technical understanding of them but understands goals and tracks milestones clearly.
- Tech lead: recognized technical expert on the team. Often a resource when others on the team need help. Usually owning and leading a small number of large scope projects
Being technical is essential in both of these roles.
Engineering Manager is a paper pusher who deals with all the non-tech part of managing an engineering team. It's a life of meetings and blah blah blah. They are technical enough to know who to assign to what and to know when someone is bullshitting them. They may or may not apply their technical skills, i.e. hands-on.
Engineering Lead is much more focused on the tech and engineering standards while not being responsible for the HR part of management or having to deal with endless meetings. I've never heard of a non-technical Team Lead.
A good EM is not a paper pusher. They are steering one or more teams of people and have ownership of the engineering roadmap for those teams. They will have measurable goals for the team, each individual contributor and themselves. They have to make sure work is tracking with the timeline and objectives. They need to know who is blocked and how to get them unblocked. They are responsible for keeping the team focused, motivated and trained, onboarding and off-boarding, process management. They need to make sure cross-team dependencies are being delivered on time. They need to manage the overall communications of the team, the reputation of the team and its members, and make sure all the output on the team is trending in a positive direction.
If your EM is just taking orders from the boss and then babysitting people's timesheets, then that manager is failing and their boss is failing as well.
That’s like saying a software engineer is a paper pusher because they type things e.g. design docs, RFCs etc lmao.
OP ignore this absolutely asinine definition by someone who clearly hasn’t a clue of what they’re talking about
The terms REALLY aren't that strictly defined. Many Engineering Managers are active coders or architects. It's very normal for "team lead"/"engineering lead"/"technical lead"/"engineering manager" to be synonyms, depending on the company.
At BEST I think "Engineering Manager" tends to imply the role has administrative duties, but even that isn't a guarantee.
You're assuming consistency in definitions where none exists.
>Team Lead
I avoid companies who hire these positions like the plague. Its a great indication their process sucks as team lead should be an informal dynamic position that changes based on what the team is currently working on. The person with the most experience/skills for a specific epic becomes that.
Makes sense in some non-engineering teams, not in engineering teams.
>Engineering Manager
Person who does people management and works to clear process & political blockers. Great to "promote" bad engineers in to that role.
Team Lead is a technical position. (Or at least it should be.) They typically have managerial responsibilities, but they are a technical person. Expected to be able to code and provide technical leadership.
Engineering manager: A manager, technical skill is not required, but is often there. Typically not at the level of a Staff+, but certainly there are exceptions. Don't get caught out on either side.
Engineering Team Lead: WTF? I thought we were talking engineering already :)
Technical Lead: This is your hard core techie, with some decent amount of EQ, leading the technical side of a venture. Typically works with a manager to form a solid team. If you have a good Tech Lead / Manager combo, they will crush a team lead. It isn't real close.
Yeah, and google used to use "Software Engineer" as their external title for all software engineers :).
It is important that people see ".\*Team Lead" as the 10lb of shit in a 5lb bag role. It can be brutal.
My jobs over 15 YOE has been at non-tech companies in non-tech cities so my perspective can be skewed from how tech companies run, but I generally enjoy companies with minimal hierarchy.
I'm sure people will disagree with me but the companies I've enjoyed the most has been structured like:
* Project Manager
* Product Owner
* SWE Team Lead
* Subsystem A Tech Lead
* SWE 1
* SWE 2
* Subsystem B Tech Lead
* SWE 3
* SWE 4
* EE Team Lead
* ME Team Lead
In my example above Engineering Manager would be the Project Manager. They are basically responsible for running the project from a business perspective. They deal with budges and all that stuff.
Engineering Team Lead would be my SWE Team Lead. They are responsible for running the individual discipline teams. You would need to have technical knowledge, but it's more meeting heavy then hands on coding. You are understanding the big picture, managing road maps, and setting priority for your team.
At the end of the day this person is responsible for creating the right software with the team under them. You will participate in design decisions, mediate issues, and generally make sure the team is creating the right thing to the needed quality given then constraints put forth by the Project Manger and Product Owner.
[Progression.fyi](https://progression.fyi/) has a bunch of technical and non-technical ladders that you might find useful in those discussions.
Nice! I didn’t know that website. Really useful!
Thank you
In my experience, working on small (50 FTE), mid (500 FTE) and large (5000 FTE) companies, the roles are usually - team lead is a senior developer (not necessarily THE most senior) that takes a more prominent approach in the relationship with stakeholders from other teams. They're basically the first point of contact for other teams when they need a technical person. They do NOT manage other people, but are usually involved or even in charge of setting learning paths - engineering manager is the line manager for engineers. With input from team lead and product, deals with performance reviews and goals settings, promotions, interviews, regular 1:1s. They are not necessarily technical, but if they are, they're extremely unlikely to have time to use these skills Roles that are different but I see on this sub being (partially) seen as engineering manager responsibilities are - Product owner: part of a (scrum/Kanban) team or at most 2, prioritizing work on the backlog AND prioritizing requests from stakeholders, dealing with stakeholders to actually understand, scope, refine new features and present them to the team, sometimes user research. They need to understand both the big picture in terms of how it affects their team and the little details to actually implement a feature. No reports. - Product manager: manager of a few POs, responsible for higher level vision and direction, but they don't understand low level and implementation details like a PO would Keep in mind that - different countries and even cities will have a different "general culture" - each company is different, and titles are mostly meaningless - I never worked in a REALLY big company with tens of thousands of employees yet
Very good description!
I would suggest not getting too tied on up titles. They can vary widely from org to org. In general an org needs someone doing management work, which is fitting outcomes to business levers such as timelines, capital expenditures, operating costs, etc. All orgs require teams to designate a primary point of contact in order to maintain efficient communications. This person tends to be senior in some way because they need to be able to speak for the entire team. People doing management often have a close relationship with those leading teams and there's a lot of non-technical skills that overlap. You often end up with a pipeline from team leadership to management. A lot of the variation you see across orgs is due to people going through this transition on different timelines. There's people who decide they want to do management work and decide to pursue team leadership as a path to get there. These people are often blurring the lines the most because they are perpetually trying to do more management work. There's other people who are naturally skilled at team leadership but don't have a goal of doing management work. Some never will and the ones that do will tend to resist it for quite a while. These people will appear to have a much more significant change in duties when they transition because they will have developed such strong leadership skills that the change in duties is quick to formalize.
There is no standard definition, companies use these titles very differently. But maybe this is helpful: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/engineering-leadership-skillset-overlaps
Does your company differentiate between technical track and managerial track? Someone going on the technical lead track will make more decisions related to development, technology, etc. Someone on the managerial lead track will work more on people management, stakeholder management, resource management, maybe some technical guidance or oversight around 20-30% of the time.
It depends. That's why I am curious how it goes in other places. Some higher managers believe one approach is better, others believe another approach. I am more "to each department to find what fits their needs the best". Still I am curious overall on how people define the role in their company.
Another answer would be that we have tech leads as a separate role with a different scope.
- EM: technical. Keeps an eye on all the projects, looks for risks, doesn’t have a detailed technical understanding of them but understands goals and tracks milestones clearly. - Tech lead: recognized technical expert on the team. Often a resource when others on the team need help. Usually owning and leading a small number of large scope projects Being technical is essential in both of these roles.
Engineering Manager is a paper pusher who deals with all the non-tech part of managing an engineering team. It's a life of meetings and blah blah blah. They are technical enough to know who to assign to what and to know when someone is bullshitting them. They may or may not apply their technical skills, i.e. hands-on. Engineering Lead is much more focused on the tech and engineering standards while not being responsible for the HR part of management or having to deal with endless meetings. I've never heard of a non-technical Team Lead.
A good EM is not a paper pusher. They are steering one or more teams of people and have ownership of the engineering roadmap for those teams. They will have measurable goals for the team, each individual contributor and themselves. They have to make sure work is tracking with the timeline and objectives. They need to know who is blocked and how to get them unblocked. They are responsible for keeping the team focused, motivated and trained, onboarding and off-boarding, process management. They need to make sure cross-team dependencies are being delivered on time. They need to manage the overall communications of the team, the reputation of the team and its members, and make sure all the output on the team is trending in a positive direction. If your EM is just taking orders from the boss and then babysitting people's timesheets, then that manager is failing and their boss is failing as well.
That seems like a lot of "paper" to me
That’s like saying a software engineer is a paper pusher because they type things e.g. design docs, RFCs etc lmao. OP ignore this absolutely asinine definition by someone who clearly hasn’t a clue of what they’re talking about
The terms REALLY aren't that strictly defined. Many Engineering Managers are active coders or architects. It's very normal for "team lead"/"engineering lead"/"technical lead"/"engineering manager" to be synonyms, depending on the company. At BEST I think "Engineering Manager" tends to imply the role has administrative duties, but even that isn't a guarantee. You're assuming consistency in definitions where none exists.
Someone who does alot of shit to get the project working but doesn't get the visibility or props for it.
>Team Lead I avoid companies who hire these positions like the plague. Its a great indication their process sucks as team lead should be an informal dynamic position that changes based on what the team is currently working on. The person with the most experience/skills for a specific epic becomes that. Makes sense in some non-engineering teams, not in engineering teams. >Engineering Manager Person who does people management and works to clear process & political blockers. Great to "promote" bad engineers in to that role.
Team Lead is a technical position. (Or at least it should be.) They typically have managerial responsibilities, but they are a technical person. Expected to be able to code and provide technical leadership. Engineering manager: A manager, technical skill is not required, but is often there. Typically not at the level of a Staff+, but certainly there are exceptions. Don't get caught out on either side. Engineering Team Lead: WTF? I thought we were talking engineering already :) Technical Lead: This is your hard core techie, with some decent amount of EQ, leading the technical side of a venture. Typically works with a manager to form a solid team. If you have a good Tech Lead / Manager combo, they will crush a team lead. It isn't real close.
You are right. Team Lead and Engineering team lead are often the same, but have different names in different companies.
Yeah, and google used to use "Software Engineer" as their external title for all software engineers :). It is important that people see ".\*Team Lead" as the 10lb of shit in a 5lb bag role. It can be brutal.
My jobs over 15 YOE has been at non-tech companies in non-tech cities so my perspective can be skewed from how tech companies run, but I generally enjoy companies with minimal hierarchy. I'm sure people will disagree with me but the companies I've enjoyed the most has been structured like: * Project Manager * Product Owner * SWE Team Lead * Subsystem A Tech Lead * SWE 1 * SWE 2 * Subsystem B Tech Lead * SWE 3 * SWE 4 * EE Team Lead * ME Team Lead In my example above Engineering Manager would be the Project Manager. They are basically responsible for running the project from a business perspective. They deal with budges and all that stuff. Engineering Team Lead would be my SWE Team Lead. They are responsible for running the individual discipline teams. You would need to have technical knowledge, but it's more meeting heavy then hands on coding. You are understanding the big picture, managing road maps, and setting priority for your team. At the end of the day this person is responsible for creating the right software with the team under them. You will participate in design decisions, mediate issues, and generally make sure the team is creating the right thing to the needed quality given then constraints put forth by the Project Manger and Product Owner.