Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader with 20+ years of experience. His current mission is accelerating the growth of technical leaders through coaching, mentoring and training. He has had many years of hands-on experience, leading, managing and improving complex organisations and software systems as the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany) and as a Technical Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. He is a frequent keynote and conference speaker, author of three books including The Retrospective Handbook, Talking with Tech Leads and Building Evolutionary Architectures and runs the free popular newsletter for leaders in tech, “Level Up” (http://levelup.patkua.com) and the Tech Lead Academy, offering online training for technical leaders. You can find him online on twitter as @patkua or running his very popular “Shortcut to Tech Leadership” and "Engineering Manager Essentials" workshops.
Many folks are thrown into the Engineering Manager (EM) role without being told what is expected of them. In this talk, we will shine a light and clarify common “shapes” of EMs, what an EM should focus on and what the “engineering” in the title really means. We will answer questions like, “Should an EM code?”, “What makes EMs different from other managers?” and “How do you know if you’re doing a g...