Leveling Up: Your Roadmap to Senior Engineering Manager

Tactical Reflections and Self-Assessment for Your Journey from Team Management to Organizational Leadership

Climbing the career ladder

Are you an IC who just transitioned into an Engineering Manager and are finding your path to the next level? Or are you a seasoned EM figuring out how to break through to the Senior Engineering Manager role? Read on!

Most companies have a Career Matrix that does a thorough job of calling out the expectations for moving from Engineering Manager (M1) to Senior Engineering Manager (M2/Manager of Managers, MoM). In this blog, I’ll trigger your reflections that help you pursue the right direction and progress your own career.

What is a Senior Engineering Manager Role?

You might wonder what a Senior Engineering Manager (often called M2 or Manager of Managers) actually does.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you draw on years of hands-on leadership experience. You typically oversee larger or multiple teams, or lead major software initiatives that span several projects or departments. Your responsibilities often include managing complex programs with broad organizational impact and longer-term goals, going well beyond the scope of a single application or scrum team.

Here are some pre-requisites to consider that will impact your path to Senior Engineering Manager:

Time in Role
One of the key factors is the actual wall-clock time you spend as an effective engineering manager-managing a single team through multiple quarters or years and overseeing several product releases before stepping up to Senior EM.

In most companies, the Engineering Manager ladder includes an M0 or transition band for those moving internally from IC roles. You typically stay at that level for about a year before moving into M1, which is considered the entry-level EM role. Some companies, like Uber or Facebook, only hire externally for M1 (not for M0). In other organizations, there may not be a transition band, and M1 itself is broad enough to include both new managers and those hired from outside to manage a single team. The M1 or frontline EM role can be a terminal level if you prefer to continue managing a single team. Depending on your company, it may take you a couple of years to excel as a frontline EM and transition through M0 → M1 → M2.

There are also experiences you’ll likely only encounter with time. For example, you might start with a strong team and not have to worry about managing a low performer for a year or two. Or, your company or team may not have open headcount to fill, so you won’t gain experience in hiring or dealing with the challenges of a rapidly growing team right away.

Breadth vs Depth
You’ll also need to choose between a deep-technical manager path and a broader scope managing multiple teams.

Historically, opportunities for deep-technical management roles were limited. However, with the rapid adoption of AI across industries, the demand for leaders with strong technical expertise is growing significantly. Today, being a deep-technical manager is more important than ever for driving innovation and guiding teams through complex, technology-driven challenges. Most career ladders don’t do a great job of calling out the split between these two tracks as they do for ICs. The key difference is the scope of your impact and how you achieve it.

You could be a manager of a single scrum team at the M2/Senior EM level if your work has significant leverage and strategic impact across the organization, or if you play an architect-type role for a team that requires it. For example, areas like search, infrastructure, and machine learning often have deep M2 managers. If you go down the deep path, you’ll likely specialize in an area (such as search or ML) and stick to that area for much of your career, becoming known as a specialist.

Most people, however, follow the broad path as generalists. This is the more standard trajectory:

• You manage a team.
• You organically grow the team with an expanded charter

The keyword here is organic, growing as the business grows and NOT to engage in empire-building.

• You split the team into two or more. If you prove yourself competent, you may have the opportunity to run both teams.
• You hire a manager for one team and continue to manage the other directly, eventually moving into manager-of-managers roles as your group expands.

Another version of the broad path sometimes emerges: you manage one team very well, and as the need for another team arises in an adjacent area-or an existing team in an adjacent area needs a manager-you are asked to take on a second team in a rapidly growing organization.

As you can see, both paths depend on business needs and opportunities that arise over multiple years.

Having said that, let’s look at some tactical ways you can move from M1 to M2, or from Engineering Manager to Senior Engineering Manager:

1. People Management

The key here is to improve your team’s efficiency through active people management — enabling and helping your people stay engaged and succeed at your company.

Today, most companies are highly selective in their hiring, so you’ll likely work with engineers who are driven and focused, and who can often self-organize and deliver results. The difference you make as their manager is in how you help them grow and become better engineers.

Aiming for and achieving mediocrity in People Management is a reachable/easy goal for most Engineering Manager/M1, but striving for excellence here is important as you scale into Senior Engineering Manager.

To excel as an Engineering Manager:

• Are you working on a career plan for each engineer that clearly outlines what they need to grow and improve to be successful in your company?
• Are you guiding your team members through improvement and feedback loops multiple times, covering different skill sets?
• Are you helping some of your engineers get promoted from one level to the next (for example, from L to L+1) over the course of a couple of performance feedback cycles? Does this include growing junior and mid-level engineers, as well as shaping senior and staff-level leaders?
• If you have several new team members who are just starting to be productive at your company, are you considering what support you can provide to help them be effective at their level?
• Are you holding a high bar for performance, and, if needed, actively managing the performance of those who do not meet expectations?

🌟 Your path to Senior EM🌟

• Are you making your engineers stewards of your company, not just your team? Are you identifying key talent who could become future technical or people leaders, and helping them find their path? Are you getting them the visibility they need from your leadership team?
• Are you encouraging and enabling your senior and staff engineers to contribute to broader groups or organizations outside your scrum team? Are you actively finding opportunities for them to pursue that go beyond your team’s boundaries?
• If someone on your team wants to explore management, are you setting them up to mentor interns or junior ICs, giving them the chance to pseudo-manage a project or team, and helping them transition from an IC to an EM role?
• In short, are you advocating ruthlessly for your team?

So how do you know if you are excelling in this area?
Some signals you can look for include your team’s employee satisfaction scores, pulse survey results focusing on the manager section, and upward feedback from your direct reports.

2. Execution & Delivering Results

This is the most important area because even if you meet every other expectation, if your team isn’t delivering consistent and impactful results, there is no path to the next level. Your primary role as a manager is to deliver value for the business. How effectively you do this depends on your skills in people management, technical leadership, and product strategy. The only way for you to deliver measurable value to your company is to execute flawlessly and ensure your team delivers results.

Given infinite time and resources, all features can, and will be delivered, but the nuance here is how do you deliver these features faster with high quality with lesser resources.

To excel as an Engineering Manager:

• How can you continuously increase the velocity and quality of your team’s work?
• Is everyone on your team working at their fullest potential? If not, how can you unlock it?
• Are you pushing your team enough? Are you holding them accountable?
• How can your team do the most impactful work, while delegating or having a process to scale for the more routine tasks?
• Are you building the most important things for the business that align with your team’s charter?
• What projects should you be investing in to provide direct impact for your company’s priorities?
• What metrics do you have to measure your team’s success in execution?

🌟 Your path to Senior EM🌟

• What cross-team partnerships do you need to forge to ensure smooth execution for your team?
• How can you share the right level of detail with your manager to gain their support for investing in or resourcing your team? [managing up]
• What is the perception of your team and your team’s execution across the organization? Do leaders feel like this is a critical team to invest in? If not, what level of context should you share, or what actions do you need to actively take to change the priority or perception of your team?

3. Technical Leadership

Your main focus here should be developing a technical strategy and ensuring you deliver on it. This could mean building a brand new 0-to-1 product, or taking on platform migrations to improve scalability or performance.

The incremental improvements in day to day is almost a given, but looking at a 1/2/3 year roadmap and investing in the right technical solution is the key.

To excel as an Engineering Manager:

• Are you regularly reviewing the critical technical plans for your team? Do you have a forum for reviewing architectural decisions?
• What technical trade-offs should you consider between long-term and short-term investments?
• How much should you slow down to invest in tech debt so you can move faster on overall deliverables?
• Do you have the right operational rigor? Are you ensuring operational excellence in reliability (including availability and latency), performance, data integrity, and proactive detection and monitoring to maintain the overall technical health of your team?

🌟 Your path to Senior EM🌟

• Are you doing thorough research to understand where your company is headed and anticipating the need to scale? Are you looking for cues in All Hands meetings and having conversations with your Head of Strategy or your VP/CTO?
• Are you ensuring that your technical investments align with your company’s multi-year technology strategy?
• Are you identifying gaps in technical strategy across the organization and building alignment for your proposals with key decision makers? Are you partnering with and deploying your trusted staff, senior staff, or architects to help make your vision a reality?
• Where should you leverage AI, and which AI tools should you invest in as a team or organization?

4. Strategy & Partnerships

In most companies, Product Managers (PMs) and Engineering Managers (EMs) are two peas in a pod. While you each have distinct roles, building the right product features-in the right order of priority-to unlock value for your customers is a shared responsibility. This includes:

• Partnering with your PM to define goals that address critical product gaps.
• Creating a structured feedback loop with customers to inform your roadmap.
• Co-owning the product backlog and collaborating on prioritization.
• Developing innovative technical solutions to execute the roadmap.

Healthy debate and occasional tension over priorities are normal and even necessary. For platform and tooling teams, investing in developer experience for internal customers remains equally critical.

To excel as an Engineering Manager:

• What features should we build next year to align with the company’s key focus areas?
• Will this investment drive new revenue, improve customer adoption, or accelerate engineering velocity?
• How do we measure the impact of our developer experience improvements?
• What are the top unresolved pain points for our customers, and how can we address them?

🌟 Your path to Senior EM🌟

• What are the top three problems for your customers, and should you solve them? If so, can you pick one unsolved pain point and get your team to chase after it?
• What else should your team focus on to help your company succeed? Should you invest in turning your product into a platform and building for leverage?
• What should you NOT do?

What will be the impact if we do NOT invest in your team’s charter at all for the next six months? What else should your team work on to drive revenue for your company?

It can be difficult to ask yourself this kind of existential question, but doing so will help you assess the importance of your team and enable you to shape your team’s charter more effectively.

5. Scaling the organization

What this entails is building the right engineering culture for your team and your company.

Being satisfied with status-quo is likely one of the failure modes here.

To excel as an Engineering Manager:

• Ask yourself- “Is what we are doing good enough? And what would make it great?”
• Are you providing a psychologically safe environment for your team? Do they feel comfortable suggesting alternative and innovative ideas that challenge the current situation and lead to new ideas, processes, or solutions?
• Are you participating in working groups and helping to push for a better culture?

🌟 Your path to Senior EM🌟

• Are you looking beyond your own team to improve processes across your company? Every organization faces challenges in areas like hiring, branding, onboarding, fostering innovation (such as through hackathons), setting up effective mentorship for engineers who feel stagnated, improving interview questions, maintaining social connections across teams, enhancing technical operations, investing in documentation, and refining SDLC processes, among many others.
• To truly excel and move toward M2/Senior EM role, are you stepping up to drive these changes from the front, making a measurable difference and impact across the organization?

That’s it! As you reflect on your journey from Engineering Manager to Senior Engineering Manager, remember that growth in leadership is both a personal and organizational pursuit. By focusing on people development, technical strategy, operational excellence, and cross-functional collaboration, you can position yourself-and your team-for lasting impact.

The landscape of engineering leadership is evolving rapidly, especially with the rise of AI and emerging technologies. How do you envision the EM or Senior EM role changing as AI becomes an even more integral part of our organizations? I’d love to hear your thoughts-share your perspective in the comments below!