The 3 pillars of the modern Engineering Manager

Your team's product, your company's finances, and industry domain knowledge.

👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I share lessons, and stories from my journey to help you lead with confidence as an Engineering Manager. To accelerate your growth see: 50 Notion Templates | The EM’s Field Guide | CodeCrafters | Get Hired as an EM | 1:1 Coaching

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Today, if you want to be a great engineering manager - not just decent - you need to be plugged into more than deadlines and standups.

Your role has grown. You’re not just a middle layer. You’re someone who understands how the product works, how the company makes money, and how the industry works.

If you want to lead with real impact, you need to get strong in three areas.

1. Your team’s product

You’re not “just a manager”. You’re also responsible for how people feel when they use your team’s work.

This means more than shipping code that runs. It means:

• Do people use it?

• Do they like it?

• Does it solve their problem?

If the answer is “not sure” that’s your first clue. You need to get closer to the product.

Here’s how you can start:

• Pick 2–3 product metrics and track them every week
  Bounce rate, feature adoption, number of sessions - whatever makes more sense for your team. If you’re not sure what to track, ask your product lead or data person. But own those numbers.

• Watch real users
  Sit in on a customer interview. Watch an interview recording. Have your engineers watch too. Ten minutes of real users interacting with your product will teach you a ton.

• Talk to customers yourself
  Yes, you. Don’t leave it all to PMs. Block time every month and join support calls or feedback sessions. Ask questions. Be curious. Let them talk.

You need to get comfortable in all of these. This is about your team after all!

2. Your company’s finances

If you don’t understand how your company makes money, you’re missing out.

You don’t need an MBA. But you do need to know the key numbers that actually matter. These are the ones that show up in board decks, investor updates, and CEO all-hands.

Start with these core financial metrics:

• Revenue: The total money coming in. Are you building things that help grow this number directly or help other teams do it?

• Gross Margin: Revenue minus the cost to deliver the product. This is huge for infra or backend teams. Are you helping reduce expensive compute or third-party services?

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much it costs to get one new customer. Can your work help lower this by making sign-up smoother or helping sales close faster?

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): How much a customer is expected to spend before they churn. If your team improves retention or expands feature use, this number goes up.

• Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who leave each month or year. If your product is flaky or confusing, this goes up. If it’s solid and useful, it goes down.

You should know where the work of your team shows up.

How to get this information:

• Ask your finance or product counterpart for dashboards they’re looking at
  Get a sense of where the company is strong and where it’s struggling.

• Link your roadmap to one of these metrics
  Say you're building a new user dashboard, great. Can it help users upgrade faster (revenue) or stay longer (LTV)? Use those numbers when you talk to leadership.

• Allow your team to care
  Engineers don’t need to memorize CAC formulas. But they should know if a feature they’re building helps keep customers or attract new ones. That context changes how they build.

3. Domain knowledge

This is one many people ignore.

If you work in healthcare, or finance, then you need to know the basics of that world. Not to be an expert, but to avoid looking lost in meetings that matter.

Here’s how to level up:

• Read one solid book or resource about your industry
  Ask your PM, ask your manager. Then actually read it. Make notes. Think through how it affects your team’s work.

• Summarise it for your team
  Don't keep it to yourself. Share a few key points from it with your team. Learning together builds trust.

• Spend a day with a sales person
  Sit with someone who talks to customers all day. What do they hear over and over again? What’s broken? What’s hard to explain?

You don’t have to be the walking Wikipedia for your industry.

But you do have to stop having the mindset of “Oh, I’m just an engineer”.

That mindset won’t take you far.

The best managers do all three

Most engineering managers pick one of these areas and double down. They get (or happen to be) really good at product, or business, or domain knowledge, but ignore the rest.

The best managers spend time on all three together.

They know how the product feels, how the business grows, and how exactly it fits in the industry. That’s how you’ll get the knowledge you need to be a force inside your company.

That’s all, folks!

See you in the next one,
~ Stephane

PS. Now that we covered the pillars of modern management, here is an image with the 4 pillars of OOP.