Can you run an engineering team if you didn’t come up through code? Yes—with intention about the EM job, how you earn trust, and how you stay technical enough to steer well.
As we said on the podcast:
“I think you can have standards for what it means to stay technical in your organization, but I don't think forcing managers to code is necessarily a good thing.”
What the EM job actually is
Your first responsibility is the system that ships—people, priorities, and clarity.
“Your role as an EM is to make sure your team is delivering what they should be delivering on schedule with a high quality bar.”
Day to day, that means: set goals, remove blockers, create healthy feedback loops, and ensure technical decisions are being made by the right people (often not you).
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