Managing Multiple Teams: Tips for Engineering Leads
Managing multiple teams — typically as a senior engineering manager, VP, or head of engineering — presents distinct challenges from managing a single team. Your impact becomes more organisational and less individual: setting context, enabling team leads, removing systemic blockers, and ensuring the teams work effectively together rather than at cross purposes.
The Transition
Moving from managing a single team to managing multiple teams requires a genuine shift in mindset. You cannot maintain the same depth of involvement in each team's day-to-day work — there is simply not enough time. Your job becomes: clear direction, capable team leads, effective coordination between teams, and removing obstacles that sit above team level.
Developing Team Leads
Your effectiveness is multiplied by your team leads' effectiveness. Invest heavily in their development — regular 1-on-1s, clear expectations, coaching on leadership challenges, air cover when they need to make difficult calls, and genuine delegation (not pseudo-delegation where you second-guess every decision).
Staying Connected Without Micromanaging
- Regular skip-level conversations — directly with engineers, not always via team leads
- Attending team ceremonies occasionally (retrospectives, demos) — participating, not supervising
- Staying close to the work through code review, architecture conversations, and product discussions
Cross-Team Coordination
Dependencies between teams are a major source of friction at scale. Make dependencies visible, track inter-team commitments explicitly, and design team structures that minimise coupling where possible.