Engineering Manager’s Bill of Rights

As engineering managers you are a builder. You are first-and-foremost measured on the success of our team’s designs, implementation quality, and predictability of delivery in meeting the business objectives.

In order to do your job effectively and optimally, you and your management must defend a certain set of inalienable rights. To wit:

1. The right to your own commitments, estimates, and delivery dates
2. The right to the committed resources and budget
3. The right to define and design the solution to the requirements
4. The right to employ your own internal processes as necessary to deliver on the commitments
5. The right and responsibility to state your minimum quality bar for delivery
6. The right to reorganize
7. The right to transition staff from one task or role to another as appropriate to deliver the project
8. The right and responsibility to state your assumptions and risks
9. The right to restate commitments if priorities, requirements, resources or budget change due to external factors outside of your scope of control
10. The right to push the “stop” button in any launch

Without these rights, you have lost some of the flexibility you may need in order to deliver. You are no longer fully empowered. If you can't deploy your people as you see fit, but have to negotiate with every responsibility change, your effectiveness is reduced. All of these are part of "committing". If you "commit", but aren't given the tools to deliver on those commitments.

That said, there are certain rights that managers sometimes push for that are inappropriate. Most importantly, you do not have the right to privacy, isolation, or complete independence of design. Management or the customer may require review and you are required to respond.

You do not have the authority to ignore requirements. You do not have the authority to ignore changes in requirements or scope or budget levels. You do not have complete autonomy in your hiring or firing process. You do not have the authority to say a product should launch now, only that it is not ready yet.

In some cases, I've seen managers work diligently to defend their own rights while working equally hard to eliminate the rights of peer managers. "They can't take person X off this project, because we need A from that person." The push-back is A is the commitment. So long as the peer manager is still committing to A, then it is there prerogative whether to use person X or Y.

That said, in most companies everything is a little less formal. Waving a bill of rights around isn't a very persuasive way to get anything done. But the bill of rights gives you something to reflect upon from time to time. If commitments aren't being treated as sacrosanct, assumptions and risks are being ignored, timelines are being artificially shortened, or friction is increasing when you want to make staff transitions then it is time to evaluate whether you need to start taking a firmer position.