Your best engineer just became a manager.
Nobody taught them the new job, and what made them a great engineer won't make them a great manager. We coach and mentor engineering managers through the switch from building to leading.
The challenges
New engineering managers go through the same growing pains, because the new job works differently from the old one.
Identity loss and competence reset
Your new manager was a top-tier engineer; now they're a beginner again. Their intuition for what's broken no longer applies directly, and many new engineering managers feel they're bad at their job for 6–12 months.
Pull to stay hands-on
Debugging feels productive and familiar; delegating feels like losing control. Many keep coding "just to help" and become a bottleneck or a single point of failure.
Scarce and distorted feedback
As engineers they had tests, deploys and code reviews telling them how they were doing. Now feedback is delayed (hiring, retention, team health), ambiguous, and filtered, because people tell the boss what they want to hear.
Time fragmentation
The calendar fills with 1:1s, planning, interviews and escalations. Deep work disappears, and it feels like nothing got done today, when the meetings, coordination and alignment are the job.
Doing the work vs. enabling it
Success is now measured through other people's output. Not knowing the answer, and being OK with that, is psychologically hard.
Inherited dilemmas
Redefining relationships with former peers (especially friends, or the person who also wanted the job), salary shock (sometimes earning less than the senior engineers they now manage), and unclear personal metrics.
Loss of peer community
Code review, mobbing and technical chatter disappear from daily life; loneliness is common.
What it costs
Here is what struggling engineering managers can cost an organization.
- 70%+of the difference in engagement between teams comes down to the manager.Source: Gallup (opens in a new tab)
- 42%of people who quit say their manager or organization could have prevented it.Source: Gallup (opens in a new tab)
- 80%of their salary is what it costs to replace someone in a technical role.Source: Gallup (opens in a new tab)
- 1 in 3engineering managers are considering going back to an engineering role.Source: LeadDev (opens in a new tab)
Unsung heroes
Great engineering managers amplify everyone around them and give senior leadership leverage.
Consistent, compounding delivery
Clear priorities and unblocked engineers mean the team ships predictably, not heroically.
Talent grows and stays
Deliberate coaching, growth paths and honest feedback turn good engineers into senior ones and cut regretted attrition.
Problems surface early
Psychological safety means issues arrive small, cheap and fixable, instead of exploding in production.
Strategy connects to code
Business context translated downward and team reality translated upward make the whole organization smarter.
Services
Our flagship program pairs each new engineering manager with a coach and mentor for blended 1:1 sessions.
Two further programs build the same skills across your group of managers: case studies written around your own leadership challenges, and a continuous performance review process.
Blended 1:1 coaching and mentoring
Our flagship program. Each new engineering manager works with one coach and mentor for three months, so they build judgment for the long run while their team keeps shipping.
Read about 1:1 coachingCustomized HBS-style case studies
Your own EM business school. We write Harvard Business School-style case studies around the challenges your engineering managers actually face, and lead a peer discussion every two weeks.
Read about case studiesContinuous performance reviews
Feedback after every project, not once a year. We set up project-based peer feedback for your engineering team, so reviews take days instead of weeks and hold no surprises.
Read about performance reviews
Team
- FN
[Founder name]
Founder · coach and mentor
[Two or three sentences: engineering background, years leading engineering teams, and what you coach on.]
Technology where it helps
Nothing replaces the expertise, intuition and trust of a human coach and mentor. Certainly not a large language model.
But we are not dogmatic, and we use technology where it makes sense. AI is good at gathering qualitative input, organizing it and synthesizing it.
In a typical coaching session, a lot of time goes into sharing context. We believe that part can be shorter and more effective, which leaves more time for the coaching itself.
We built our own tooling to do this. It lets us offer you and your engineering managers better and more accessible coaching than traditional programs.
- 01
Initial meeting
We learn about your priorities and your organizational context, explain our approach in detail and answer your questions.
- 02
Paperwork and kickoff
If it's a good fit for both sides, we finalize the paperwork and kick things off.
- 03
1:1 coaching for new managers
Your newly promoted engineering managers get blended 1:1 coaching and mentoring over three months.
- 04
Your own EM business school
We pick the leadership challenges most relevant to your managers, turn them into HBS-style case studies and facilitate the discussion.
- 05
Continuous performance reviews
To make a high-performance culture last, we help you adopt a continuous performance review process.
Great engineering managers aren't born.They're coached.
Book some time