“Engineering Director” is a significant milestone that many engineering managers aspire for. It is “next in sequence” in a career ladder for Senior Engineering Managers, but it feels like more than just a more senior version of a “Senior Manager”. On one hand, it’s fairly scarce, to the frustrations of many managers, and it often feels elusive. On the other hand, it seems to carry some heft to it, both in terms of the responsibilities it implies, and the status it infers.

You may ask yourself what Engineering Directors do, exactly. What does success look like in the role? You may want to know if it is right for you. If it is, you may want to figure out what you need to do to get promoted to one (or be hired as one) - likely by working backwards from a successful promotion (or getting hired into the role). While this post won’t have all the answers by any means, I’ll try to share some observations – thematic “truths” and misconceptions behind the role.

What Makes the Role Special?

For one, the ratios. A company has only so much headcount allocated to senior leadership. Let’s do the math (knowing full well that each organization is different, but just for illustrative purposes): say there is a manager for every 6-10 engineers and a director for every 3-5 managers. This means that an organization of 100 engineers likely only has capacity for three directors. This means there aren’t a lot of data points to learn from or extrapolate from, and not a lot of “spots” that might be available at a company. But this is largely by design and not a “defect” – companies that introduce this layer of management into their organizations usually seek a level of consolidation of leadership in order for the engineering group to be managed effectively.

While we may not be able to do a “large scale study” of the role, we can deduce some things about the Director role just by extrapolating it as a “more senior Senior Manager”. A Director is expected to be more independent (and likely has more agency), has a greater scope of responsibility (e.g. the impact of the missions they own) and control (e.g. the number of people they manage). When hiring or promoting Directors, leaders are likely looking for more years or experience, greater maturity and better judgment. But is there something we can understand about the role that is unique to Engineering, or to the Director level specifically?

There are many schools of thought, and to be fair, each company will have a different set of needs, and its leaders will possess different sets of experiences they will lean on when creating this role. My philosophy is that a Director role is indeed special in that it is an inflection point for a number of attributes of management. These are, in my mind:

• Less-senior management roles focus on execution within a well-defined goal, while a Director role places heavy emphasis on the shaping of the goal in the first place. This is where the ratios carry some truth – it’s not feasible to have dozens of “goal-shapers” in an engineering organization of 100. This is challenging because throughout most of your career (and, likely, your educational experience), you will likely have learned how to execute more and more effectively towards a goal given to you by someone else. Suddenly, while still important, execution starts to take the back seat to strategy.
• Engineering Directors are often given organizational tools which confirm their agency, that are more rarely given to less senior leaders. This includes budgets, headcount, decision-making authority with vendors, partners and tools. These may not seem significant, but they magnify the Director’s leverage – a manager of 10 can misguide one large project; a director able to onboard multiple contractors can lead a number of initiatives down the wrong path. Again, this is also usually an ability that is not emphasized or incentivized in less senior roles. The ability to select an appropriate vendor is probably one of the most under-rated and critical abilities in today’s engineering organizations, and barely anyone talks about it.
• Directors are expected to use organizational tools (shaping the org structure, thinking about staffing models, etc.) significantly more than managers. In large part, they are responsible for larger orgs, so they have more degrees of freedom to make sweeping changes. They are also more aware of what a larger portion of the organization is doing, which (in theory) allows them to make decisions at such macro level. Most companies don’t look kindly to organization changes, so most leaders (let alone less senior leaders) never get to try organizational design enough to work out a muscle or build a set of intuitions around what makes for an effective group.
• Directors are frequently held accountable for outcomes regardless of their ability to directly shape them; on a “per unit of decision,” they have less control over outcomes than more junior leaders, even though their decisions are more sweeping. This is because in addition of them being further away from the individuals doing work, their decisions are more affected by the rest of the organization, and have to account for more ambiguity. Good leaders reduce ambiguity for their managers, but the downside is that these managers may have spent most of their professional careers up until now living in a fairly contrived environment of “forced local stability”.
• New kind of abilities become important in the role. These are, for example, polish, organizational tact, level-headedness, and an ability to transform ambiguity into certainty. These are capabilities that you may not learn “on the job” as a Senior Manager, and what’s more, there may not even be a solid understanding in your company of what these abilities should look like.
• Directors are under more pressure to “do things” – place bigger bets, create step function changes, change the direction of the organization somehow. That can be at best confusing, and at worst actually detrimental for the company. Good Directors steer clear from such landmines, but bestowed with new powers, new leaders are usually tempted to use them, even if their efficacy is questionable.

One theme in all of the above is that Directors, in my experience, are generally more trusted, but that trust comes with an assumption of excellent judgment on the Director’s part and an ability to run things without needing much oversight. Both are a natural outcome of a “golden rule” of organizations: that

The higher you are in an organization, the less well-managed you likely are.

One more point: Some companies don’t have a strong sense of what they want in a Director (or even whether they need one), and they may simply think of a “more senior Senior Engineering Manager.” In situations like this, I would even more strongly recommend thinking about what is needed in the job – and perhaps helping the company shape this understanding. Otherwise, new Directors may find themselves quickly subject to the Peter Principle, promoted by inertia to the point where they are no longer able to do their job well.

How to Become One?

The path to becoming a Director is more varied, and somewhat less defined – one might even say, more speculative. It’s a mixture of luck (what initiatives or projects you happen to have owned), relationships, perhaps some politics. It definitely matters whether it’s a hot labor market (lots of competition, so companies compete on titles) or not. If you’re used to an idea of a meritocracy “all the way to the top,” you need to re-assess your assumptions, but don’t fret – there is still a tremendous amount that is in your control.

Assuming you are a Senior Engineering Manager and want to be promoted, I would posit that you need to do three things better than anything else: create multiple world-class teams, create clear wins, and create your luck.

• Build world-class teams. I say “multiple” because then, you didn’t just get lucky with particularly strong and highly functioning team (or a product with very strong market fit) – you have a systematic approach to standing up organizational units. A great manager will groom each individual to be the best version of themselves; but you need to groom the whole lot to be best team they can be. This means maximizing the individuals’ potential, forming team dynamics, placing people that augment the team, and creating a machine of continuous improvement.
• Ensure clear wins for your team, but also ones where your contributions are clear (and ideally uniquely so). There’s a fine line between attribution and boasting; the best leaders can’t stop talking about their teams, but they will never be caught talking about themselves; they let others do that job for them. By creating (and celebrating) wins for your team, you are also creating a flywheel of team members wanting to be associated with you – on your teams, being mentored by you, etc.
• Create your luck. Ensure you’re at the right times in the right place; when an initiative needs an owner, consider stepping up. Help newer leaders or teams that struggle. Have conversations with other leaders, and especially leaders outside of Engineering, to be in the know as new problems emerge that you can help with.

One of the more inspiring leaders I’ve met does bi-weekly rotations and literally embeds with other teams as an individual contributor, unblocking whatever technical and organizational inertia that team got stuck with. True, not everyone is able to get dropped into problems like this, but it’s one of the clearer ways to build a reputation for yourself and ensure that the most visible and impactful problems literally get sent your way.

What to Focus On Once You’ve Got the Job?

As a Director, expect having less oversight, and being on more fickle ground. Decisions made by Directors are probed and questioned less than those of less senior leaders. Directors get less feedback – which means fewer clear opportunities to learn. As a result, Directors are expected to have excellent judgment, much of which is expected to come from experience.

The most important thing in the role, especially if you lack the years of experience to automatically pattern match any situation, is for you to learn to extract information from any source you can. Even if you never get direct feedback from your manager, there are lots of ways to see how you are doing:

• Focus on getting feedback from your direct reports. Your direct reports may not be open with you, but often it’s what they don’t say that is important. And trust and vulnerability becomes a valuable currency – if you openly share your own self-reflections (perhaps by sharing the self-assessment you write during the review cycle), your direct reports will feel that it’s safe to share what they think.
• Go deeper in the org chart. People who don’t directly report to you tend to be more candid, especially if you create opportunities for them to share their feedback – anonymously if need be, or at least in a “safe” environment, e.g. through skip-level and 1:1/small group meetings.
• Use your peers! They are usually people who, similarly, lack quality feedback, but also understand that their effectiveness is dependent on effective collaboration with you and their other peers. They may not give you feedback publicly, but you will likely get good signal in 1:1 settings.

Other than feedback, you will likely find that your manager no longer has the time (or ability) to mentor you. At this level, you have to seek our mentorship. You can do it by synthesizing it from a number of sources (e.g. pick a “braintrust” of people, each of whom can help you with a particular blind spot), or by looking outside or seeking a senior leader who is not your manager.

In second order, your success will hinge on your ability to hire and retain strong leaders. Managing managers is very different from managing ICs. You are further away from specific outcomes and you will see a majority of your time being spent on the approach to management and the principles behind it. You will be conflicted between giving your managers agency, careful not to micro-manage your managers, and ensuring good outcomes, even if style and approach differences seem to get in the way. And, unlike much of the work that ICs do, your managers have to deal with a lot of ambiguity, which makes managing them tricky. How do you separate “bad luck” from bad judgment or poor abilities?

It’s important that you find trusted lieutenants - the higher your position in the organization, the more your job becomes almost exclusively finding, grooming, and retaining people more capable than you. You will end up spending 80% of your time managing the 20% of managers who need the most oversight, so it’s critical that you have leaders in your organization whom you can rely on. For this, you will need to become a good judge of character. Often, this ability comes with experience, but by focusing on what drives people and by asking critical questions you can build a deep understanding of your leaders.

Finally, as a Director, you will be expected to own outcomes, and set your goals. This requires a good deal of critical thinking (Is this direction we’ve been taking so far the right one? Is this seemingly “obvious” goal appropriate?), initiative-taking (There is a lot of impact to be had in areas that nobody is focusing on), and courage.

The Politics of It

Cynical leaders will tell you that senior leadership is all about politics – “getting in” is all about whom you know, and success is all about making your bosses look good and taking credit for your team’s successes. While it’s possible that some organizations operate that way, I would suggest avoiding them. At best, you will find yourself dedicating your cycles to unproductive means; at worst, you will cause yourself and others a good deal of pain.

That said, as a Director, you have to be more aware of the company’s organizational dynamics – they are present in every company, and they affect you more than they affect less senior leaders. This means understanding deeply the organization, its structure, and how it connects to business outcomes. Companies have their actual hierarchies, which are conduits for how things get done (who gets to make decisions, how information and authority travels across the company), but they also have “shadow hierarchies” – how power is concentrated, who breaks ties, who makes calls vs just rubber stamping. It’s important to know both, so that you can be an effective leader. To start with, build a map of these relationships and dynamics and know whom to talk to and whom to bring into decisions. Be aware of places where the official hierarchy differs from the shadow hierarchy – these are often the “faultlines” where decisions seem to be made inconsistently or irrationally.

Moreover, optics will play a larger role in your success. Some leaders focus on optics at the expense of good work. I wouldn’t advise it, even if you’re good at managing the optics: the downside is that you’re likely not learning enough, and create organizational debt that may come back to bite you later. But be aware of how the outcomes in your organization are perceived, and make sure that you are in control of the story that is told. In the very least, you owe that to your team.

To Top off, Some Misconceptions

I like to mention some common misconceptions about the role, since they are often the cause of stumbles early on in a new Director’s career.

“A director is just a more senior Senior Manager”

Hopefully this post has helped dispel this notion. While there may be organizations that expect their Directors to be incrementally more senior than their Senior Managers (for example, because they are trying to retain their people and don’t mind giving them that title), it’s good to set a high bar for yourself, in the very least so that you can maximize your growth and learning as you progress in your career.

“As a Director, I can (finally) tell people what to do”

The most effective Directors lead people to achieve great outcomes, as opposed to dragging them through a specific path of action. You may think that Directors have a great deal of power, and while this may be the case, the most effective lever you have is soft power; an ability to inspire your team, nudge others (especially outside of Engineering), and shape the narratives that make seemingly impossible things possible.

“It will be frowned upon / I have no time / It’s beneath me to write code anymore”

This is a tough misconception to work through, because statistically speaking, as Engineering Director (on the management track), you probably won’t be writing a lot of code. But I would caution against arriving there for the wrong reasons. For example, teams love being led by technical leaders and if anything, the management track suffers from the opposite problem: far too many leaders have lost their technical intuitions or have never had a chance to develop them. As for time, it’s one thing to realize that your time is filled with higher “ROI” activities – so that you writing code is actually less impactful than other work you could be doing; but don’t hide behind lack of agency when it comes to managing your priorities.

I would also encourage you to consider potentially bucking the trend, if circumstances so require. Diving deep into a technical topic might be needed to help unblock a team, or may help you learn something fundamental about your team (or – even more broadly – about the sub-culture of your whole group). Or maybe, just maybe, you can impress some people on your team!

An Engineering Director title is often coveted, and usually comes with meaningfully higher rewards, let alone the intrinsically valuable perks of greater autonomy and agency. In my view there isn’t a recipe for how to become one, or for how to be successful in the role once you land it. Hopefully, your experience so far has given you the building blocks to be an effective Director, but you would be well served to check some of the misconceptions that you – or others in your organization, including your manager! – may have about the role. At the same time, keep in mind that to some extent, the role is what you shape it, especially in organizations that don’t boast a large cohort of Engineering Directors. So go ahead and shape it, remembering that, as my uncle said to me when I was young, with great power comes great responsibility.