Sep 13, 2021
What does my engineering manager do all day?
I officially transitioned from a lead frontend engineer to a senior engineering manager this year and wanted to provide some insight into the age-old question: what does my manager even do all day?
I took a fairly average week from my Outlook calendar and formatted it to what you see below. If you add up all the “free time” between all my meetings in a 9–5 window, I had 4 hours in this particular week to “work” on things.
What do you think? Is this what you expected? Are you an engineer and think I’m wasting time? Are you a manager and think I’m terrible at time management? Which meetings would you cut?
Monday
7:30 AM — Tech operations center daily briefing (production issue post-mortems)
9:00 AM — Sr. director staff meeting
10:00 AM — Team #1 standup
10:30 AM — Team #2 standup
11:00 AM — Sr. director 1-on-1
11:45 AM — Meeting for increasing ads size
12:00 PM — Lunch & anti-racisim webinar
1:00 PM — Team #1 quarterly NPS survey review
2:00 PM — Team #2 quarterly NPS survey review
3:00 PM — Ad-hoc status update for time sensitive feature
3:30 PM — 30 min free time!
4:00 PM — Discuss boundaries between app teams and platform with director & sr. director
4:30 PM — 30 min free time!
Tuesday
7:30 AM — Tech operations center daily briefing (production issue post-mortems)
8:00 AM — Team #2 inter-team standup (with a partner team)
8:30 AM — Webinar for distributed ledgers in enterprise
9:30 AM — Super-group (pillar) weekly experience review
10:00 AM — Team #1 standup
10:30 AM — Team #2 standup
11:00 AM — 30 min free time!
11:30 AM — 1-on-1 with scrum master
12:00 PM — Doctor’s appointment
1:00 PM — Vendor bi-weekly status updates for upcoming major product test
2:00 PM — 1 hour free time!
3:00 PM — Interview for a senior engineer for another team
4:00 PM — Pro-bono project touch-base
4:30 PM — 30 min free time!
Wednesday
7:30 AM — Tech operations center daily briefing (production issue post-mortems)
8:00 AM — API migration monthly status update
9:00 AM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #1
9:30 AM — Discussing baseline performance metrics with engineer
10:00 AM — Organization-wide holidays peak kick-off
11:00 AM — Standup & backlog grooming with team #2
12:00 PM — Lunch!
1:00 PM — Standup & backlog grooming with team #1
2:00 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer A
2:30 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer B
3:00 PM — Team #2 sync up with SEO consultants
3:30 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer C
4:00 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer D
4:30 PM — Going-away get together for team #2 member
Thursday
7:30 AM — Tech operations center daily briefing (production issue post-mortems)
9:00 AM — Lead engineer bi-weekly touch-base & discussion of top-of-mind engineering topics
10:00 AM — New leader development pilot
11:30 AM — 30 min free time!
12:00 PM — Lunch & catching up with former manager
1:00 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer E
1:30 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer F
2:00 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer G
2:30 PM — 1-on-1 with engineer H
3:00 PM — Team #1 virtual happy hour
3:30 PM — Meeting to understand and prioritize new feature request from partner team
4:00 PM — Pro-bono meeting to set up client account
4:30 PM — 30 min free time!
Friday
7:30 AM — Tech operations center daily briefing (production issue post-mortems)
10:00 AM — Migration milestone bug bash
11:30 AM — 1-on-1 with product partner director
12:00 PM — Lunch!
1:00 PM — Holidays peak preparation meeting for team #2
2:00 PM — 50 days of learning
