When is the right time to start preparing?

If you are asking yourself this question, you have probably already taken on some activities that assume more ownership and are interested if EL will be the right thing for you. If you believe that at this moment engineering leadership is your inspiration you can start preparing even today by growing to a Senior Engineer (if you are not there yet). In parallel you can start developing some of the specialisations that help you build skills that are essential for the role. You can start with facilitating team rituals such as retrospective, helping new engineers with their onboarding, mentoring other engineers, and many more.

Wait a minute? That's all cool, but what do I really need to do in the role of an EL.

A good approach is to look at the progression level for an EL at Luko. There you will find suggested specialisation that an EL should develop. Further understanding the expectations and what you should already have as skills and experience is important for making a solid growth plan with your manager. Do not be shy bringing your inspiration to your manager, and you will receive support and guidance. For instance, your manager will challenge your thinking, share experience and advise you on how to learn more. They might decide to delegate some of their tasks for you to learn in a safe environment with their support and will start coaching you in areas that will help you move.

I will be managing people and a team. How is then an EL different from an EM?

This might be indeed a little unclear sometimes. In many companies, an engineering lead or technical lead role comes with more responsibilities without a recognition on a ladder and on compensation. At Luko an engineering lead is part of the career ladder and is recognised as a level of responsibility and growth. An engineering lead is a lightweight version of an engineering manager. Usually, this is the first step one will take in the managers track and will assume the core management responsibilities (people, process, organisation) on the scale of one product engineering team of 2-6 engineers. That will allow you to learn in an environment where you still do a lot of what you are very comfortable with (engineering) while learning core management skills.

There are some key differences between engineering leads and engineering managers.

• An EL leads one product engineering team, while an EM leads 2+ such teams.
• An EL is always direct manager of all people in their team, while an EM has direct and indirect reports in their organisation.
• An EL spends 20-30% of their time on management and the rest on engineering as a senior engineer, while an EM will have +50% on management depending on their organisation size.
• An EL has their team as direct reports and conducts performance evaluations. They advise their EM on promotions and performance evaluations outcomes. The EM takes the final decision with the input from the EL.
• An EL focuses on building their team and achieving high team performance. An EM focuses on building an engineering leadership team with all their ELs and supporting them in building high-performing teams.
• An EM owns its organisation budget, and all requests for open positions and other expenses of an EL should align with them.

When an EL is in a transition to an EM role, the aforementioned differences will be less visible.

I am an EL now. What if it turns out that I discover it is not my thing?

This is a great question! It is important to understand that transitioning between maker and manager tracks in the Lukoladder is not a promotion. At any level where that is possible, once agreed on, it is an adjacent move. In other words, you are safe to fail if that doesn't work for you but we expect you that once you have taken on the challenge you will make an effort to be successful and objectively assess if that is for you or not. Do not give up easily but if you feel that this is not for you it is OK.

When will it be possible to move to the EL role?

The most honest answer to this question is that it depends on the opportunities at Luko and your readiness for the challenge, and if you are the best candidate for the role in a specific context. Every time we have the need for creating a new team or splitting a team, we most likely need a new EL. In those cases, we will usually open a position and the opportunity is officially there. It is possible that there are more than one person who are ready and willing to take on the managers path. This means that in some situations, even if you are ready according to your manager, you might not be the best fit for the role in the context of the new team. This could be due to the required experience, e.g. specific technical or operational experience, or due to a preference of the key stakeholders of the new team (product). Either way, with the expected rapid future growth of Luko there will be many opportunities to become an EL and therefore, we should be able to support the professional inspiration of our engineers.