How To Navigate Your First Month As An Engineering Manager
Lay foundations before you build anything.
If you started playing The Witcher 3 mid-quest, without any background or experience of that game, you’d feel very confused.
Starting a new job as an engineering manager (EM) isn’t all that different. At first, you’ll be disoriented, with a disorganized inventory, and facing surprise enemies without knowing how to wield your sword or cast Axiis.
If you played every day for a week, you’d improve, but you still wouldn’t feel confident or skilled
However, after a month, you’d no longer be just rolling out of the way and hoping for the best – you’d be dodging, fighting, and making informed choices. You wouldn’t be an actual Witcher yet, but you’d be better.
Your first month as an EM can be tough, and you’ll need time to adjust and learn. But you don’t have to learn everything the hard way – you can learn from what others have figured out.
Here’s some of what I’ve learned. But first.
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Now, back to your first month!
Your first goal: keep learning and building trust
Your first day and week are packed with learning your company’s systems and processes. But, as you can probably tell by now, a week isn’t enough to fully master all you need to know.
Mastery comes after 10,000 hours of practice. That’s more than a year of mindfully practicing something every day. So, in your first month, learning should be your first goal. But go easy on yourself – you’re not going to know everything straightaway.
However, learning isn’t just about tools and processes, it’s also about your team.
If you haven’t finished all your first one-on-one meetings with your team during your first week, use the first month for that. Depending on your team’s size, it’s normal for those conversations to stretch out.
Those one-on-ones allow you to know more about your team, such as:
What motivates them
Their personality traits and how they react to pressure
If they are confrontational or avoid conflict at all costs
How they feel at work
How they want to connect with you (strictly professionally or on a more personal level)
And much more
These conversations are your first step in building trust. Trust doesn’t happen instantly, and it can’t be rushed. It’s a long process, but starting by showing an interest in who they are and what they need is a good foundation.
Also, your team will give you the most important clues on what’s working in your department and what’s not. Listening to what they’re saying directly – or indirectly through their results or attitude – gives you direction on what you need to change or implement in the future.
Your second goal: talk with other people
There’s another group to get to know during your first month: other department managers.
They might seem an intimidating group to talk to, but they aren’t your enemies – in fact, they can be your most valuable allies.
They won’t hand you a roadmap or tell you exactly what to do. But by understanding their perspectives, priorities, and problems, you’ll gain valuable insight into the broader system you’ve just stepped into. And that insight will shape what you choose to focus on – not just this month, but throughout your first year.
Importantly, you’ll start to understand how their departments interact with yours. That insight matters. For example, if your team is working with designers and the design managers think they’re not collaborating well – you need to know! Or maybe there’s a conflict between different teams that needs resolving.
Seeing things from different points of view gives you more perspective and puts you in a better position to address any issues.
Your third goal: fight the urge to change things
The more time you spend observing your team, the more problems you’ll start to see. It’s very tempting to start implementing changes.
Maybe you’ll notice:
Technical debt: how your team is firefighting issues from old code instead of making meaningful progress
Workflow clogs: bottlenecks in development, with code reviews, QA testing, or deployment slowing everything down
Lack of clarity: unclear task delegation, engineers unsure about who is responsible for what, leading to duplicated work or tasks falling through the cracks
General: or any of the thousand problems that could be happening within your team!
As tempting as it might be to jump in and start fixing everything, fight the urge. Coming in like an expert and starting to change everything that’s not working causes chaos, and it doesn’t help your team. Instead, focus on learning about them.
Almost every “simple” problem comes from something deeper – layers of decisions, habits, tradeoffs, and history you don’t yet understand. You need time to learn all the intricacies and details that create the issue before solving it.
Quite simply, your first month is not enough time to learn all this.
Think of it like a conveyor belt in a factory that’s running with a malfunction. But if you shut it down and try to rebuild it from scratch without a proper plan, you won’t just stop the belt. You’ll halt production across the entire plant.
Instead of rushing to dismantle the conveyor belt, it’s better to:
Understand the malfunction
Find solutions to replace the conveyor while it’s getting fixed
Make a solid plan
And then fix it
You’ll get your chance to improve things. But your first month isn’t about fixing, it’s about understanding. No matter how crazy it’s driving you!
Your final goal: assess what’s missing
In The Witcher, after every battle, you pause. You check your health, take stock of your resources, and assess the state of your weapons. Maybe you:
Check if you have enough food to replenish your health later, or eat something right away
Make sure you’ve got potions and supplies for the next fight
Or head to the blacksmith to repair your sword
You do these things not just because they’re useful but because they’re necessary to keep going. The same applies to your first month as a manager.
You’ve come into this role with plenty of transferable skills from your time as an engineer: problem-solving, systems thinking, and deep technical context. These serve you well. But leadership brings new challenges, and chances are, there are a few tools missing from your inventory. These often include:
Communication
Delegation
Time management
Team management
And self-management
The good news is all these skills can be learned. There are many ways to develop: courses, books, YouTube videos, podcasts, newsletters, mentorship, or even a supervisor who can help you.
Some skills will come easily. Others will take time, practice, and patience. And that’s okay. Over time, experience helps you become prepared for diverse situations. Until then – and especially during your first month – make a list of the most urgent matters and what you need to learn to solve them successfully.
And prepare to put one foot in front of the other until managing becomes as natural as coding was for you.
The short version: prepare for the next level
If you were playing The Witcher for the first time, you wouldn’t expect to defeat the final boss in your first hour.
You’d take the time to understand the characters and their roles in your missions. You might look up tutorials, talk to other players, or observe what works before deciding how to play. And above all, you’d let yourself enjoy the game as it is – without trying to rewrite it before you’ve even learned how it works.
This approach makes perfect sense in a game. But in a new management role, it’s surprisingly easy to forget. We often rush in, driven by the desire to prove ourselves, to make things better, or simply to feel more in control. But that speed can often lead to missteps.
So, instead, take your time to learn about your:
Team: get to know your team, their personalities, what they bring to the table, and how you can best serve them
Docs: keep reading all the materials you had access to during your first days
Collaboration: meet other managers to understand their histories, and notice where departments connect (or collide!)
Strategy: don’t change processes or dismantle systems too soon – focus on learning about them instead
Development: make a list of the skills you’ll need to build for the path ahead
If you approach it with care and consideration, your first month won’t just be a trial to survive. It will be the start of a meaningful, sustainable, and fulfilling journey into leadership.
Changes to Thriving In Engineering
Changes are coming to Thriving In Engineering, and I want to be upfront with you about that. Going forward, some weekly guides will only be completely available to paying subscribers. For example, starting May 23, 2025, I’ll be curating the most insightful and relevant posts from across Substack into a single, easy-to-digest guide every Friday.
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Great points. It's tempting to rush into changing things, while we don't fully understand the full picture. Budling trust and credibility instead it's a much more effective strategy.