Engineering Notes
Thoughts and Ideas on AI by Muthukrishnan
Engineering Manager
Master the Art of Managing Up and Across
The highest-leverage skill most engineering managers neglect isn't managing their team—it's managing up to leadership a...Architect for Reversibility as a High-Velocity Advantage
The most expensive decisions in engineering aren't the wrong ones—they're the ones that take too long to make. Every da...Expand Your Decision-Making Bandwidth, Not Your Meeting Calendar
The most dangerous bottleneck in a scaling engineering organization isn't compute, infrastructure, or even talent—it's ...Manage Technical Investment Velocity, Not Just Delivery Velocity
Most engineering managers obsess over delivery velocity—story points completed, features shipped, sprint goals met. But...Design Self-Correcting Systems, Not Processes
The best engineering managers don't build processes—they design systems that correct themselves. The difference is prof...Design Your Dependency Architecture for Organizational Velocity
Most engineering managers obsess over code architecture while ignoring the dependency architecture that determines actu...Master Influence Without Authority to Scale Impact Beyond Your Team
As an engineering manager, your biggest leverage opportunities often lie outside your direct reporting chain. The abili...Optimize Deployment Frequency as Your Competitive Moat
The best engineering organizations don't just ship faster—they've engineered their systems to make shipping boring. Dep...Architect Your Staff-Plus Pipeline
Most engineering managers focus on growing mid-level engineers. The real leverage? Building a systematic pipeline for S...Architect Your Promotion Pipeline with Growth Systems Not Career Ladders
Most engineering managers think about promotions reactively: someone performs well, you promote them. But exceptional E...Design Your Teams Decision Latency
Most engineering managers obsess over making the *right* decisions. But the teams that win aren't necessarily the ones ...Shape the Decision Space Before the Decision
The most impactful engineering managers don't make great decisions—they ensure great decisions get made without them. ...Engineer the Ramp-Up Time to Fix Your Scalability Bottleneck
The single most underestimated constraint in scaling engineering organizations is not hiring velocity, budget, or techn...Master Calibration for Consistent Fair Decisions at Scale
The best engineering managers I know have mastered a skill rarely discussed in management literature: **calibration**. ...Build Context Portability, Not Knowledge Silos
The best engineering managers don't just manage people—they architect how context flows through their organization. The...Write Engineering Investment Cases, Not Technical Proposals
The difference between senior and staff-level engineering leaders often comes down to one skill: the ability to transla...Design for Disaggregation and the Hidden Art of Scaling
Most engineering managers think about scaling by adding more people. Elite EMs think about scaling by designing systems...Manage Your Teams Cognitive Load Budget
Most engineering managers obsess over headcount, sprint capacity, and story points. But the most critical resource you'...Manage Signal-to-Noise - The Hidden Cost of Organizational Chatter
The most underrated skill in scaling engineering organizations isn't hiring faster or building better processes—it's **...Architect Your Teams Communication Protocol
Most engineering managers focus on processes, tools, and org structure while ignoring the most critical infrastructure:...Build Abstractions That Accelerate, Not Complicate
Most engineering managers understand abstractions theoretically—they reduce duplication, hide complexity, and enable re...Codify Your Quality Bar and Make Standards Executable
The best engineering managers don't just set standards—they make them impossible to ignore by encoding them into the de...Create Clarity Artifacts to Turn Ambiguity into Executable Alignment
The skill that separates senior engineering managers from everyone else isn't technical brilliance or charisma—it's the...Build Organizational Memory, Not Institutional Knowledge
Most engineering managers worry about losing "institutional knowledge" when people leave. But that's the wrong frame. K...Run Pre-Mortems, Not Post-Mortems
Most engineering teams are great at post-mortems—dissecting what went wrong after a failure. But elite teams do somethi...Design Ownership Boundaries, Not Org Charts
Most engineering managers scale teams by drawing org charts. The best ones design ownership boundaries first, then let ...Transform Failures Into Capability, Not Bureaucracy
Every organization faces failures: outages, security incidents, missed deadlines, botched releases. The critical questi...Build Leverage Through Documentation as Code
The best engineering managers don't just build products—they build systems that make knowledge transfer automatic, deci...Debug Organizational Velocity, Not Individual Productivity
Most engineering managers obsess over individual productivity. They measure story points, track commit frequency, and o...Make Trade-offs Explicit as a Clarity Multiplier
The most powerful thing you can do as an engineering manager isn't making better decisions—it's making the trade-offs b...Engineer the Handoffs Where Most Productivity Dies
Most engineering managers optimize for individual productivity. They focus on hiring great people, improving code quali...Invest in Compounding Leverage
The difference between good engineering managers and exceptional ones isn't how much they do—it's how much compounds ov...Build Conviction Through Small Bets
The best engineering managers don't make big decisions through perfect analysis—they build conviction through strategic...Scale Culture Through Defaults, Not Rules
Most engineering managers try to scale culture through policies, rules, and guidelines. They write extensive playbooks,...Manage Your Attention Budget as Your Scarcest Resource
You can always hire more engineers. You can negotiate for a bigger budget. You can even extend deadlines. But you cann...Design Your Feedback Loops
The difference between a mediocre engineering organization and an exceptional one often comes down to a single variable...Hire for Trajectory, Not Just Skills
Most engineering managers hire for what candidates can do today. Great engineering managers hire for where candidates w...How Great EMs Shape Reality Through Storytelling
The best engineering managers understand a powerful truth: **the story you tell about your team's work often matters mo...Lead with Leading Indicators to Predict Problems Before They Happen
Most engineering managers are firefighters. They react to outages, missed deadlines, and team burnout after the damage ...The Multiplier Mindset for Identifying and Amplifying Force Multipliers
Most engineering managers operate in **addition mode**: hire another engineer, add another process, create another meet...Architect Your Culture with Decision Records
Most engineering managers focus on making good decisions. The best ones focus on **capturing why decisions were made**....Make Decisions Reversible
One of the highest-leverage skills you can develop as an engineering manager is **designing your decisions to be revers...Build Escalation Paths, Not Firefighters
The best engineering managers don't pride themselves on being heroic problem-solvers. They build systems that prevent p...Measure What Matters Through Data-Informed Leadership
As an engineering manager, your ability to lead effectively at scale hinges on one crucial skill: **measuring what matt...Treat Tech Debt Like a Financial Portfolio
As an engineering manager, your role evolves from solving technical problems to building a system that solves problems....Decentralize Decisions, Centralize Context
As an engineering manager, one of the most significant shifts you can make to level up is to stop being the primary dec...Manage Energy Not Time for Sustainable High Performance
As an engineering manager, you've mastered the basics: 1-on-1s, feedback, and project tracking. But to reach the next l...Pave the Road to Scalable Speed in Your Engineering Org
As an engineering manager, you're constantly balancing the pressure to deliver new features with the need to maintain a...Shape the Environment Instead of Just Managing the Plants
As an engineering manager, it's easy to get trapped in the cycle of managing people and tasks—the individual "plants" i...Your Engineering Org is Your Product
As an engineering manager, it's easy to get trapped in the cycle of shipping features. Your team delivers, the business...Mastering the Why in High-Impact Engineering Communication
As an engineering manager, your technical skills got you to where you are, but your communication skills will propel yo...The Art of Strategic Quitting and Knowing When to Say No
As an engineering manager, you're driven to build, innovate, and deliver. But one of the most powerful skills for long-...Your Team Is Not a Family but a High-Performance System
One of the most common metaphors in team building is the idea of being a "family." While intended to foster closeness, ...Stop Managing People, Start Managing the System
As an engineering manager, your instinct is often to manage people. You track individual performance, mediate disputes,...Manufacture Slack as the Counterintuitive Key to High-Performing Teams
As an engineering manager, your instinct is to maximize output by maximizing utilization. Every hour should be accounte...From Customer Value to Code as the EMs Strategic Blueprint
As an engineering manager, it's easy to get trapped in the cycle of shipping features, closing tickets, and managing sp...From Business Goals to Code with Backward Thinking
## Stop Building Features, Start Driving Outcomes The most impactful shift an engineering manager can make is to move ...