Intercom Engineering Meetup - Management

Why talk about Engineering Management?

The move from maker to manager is one of the hardest transitions to make but also an incredibly rewarding journey if it’s well supported.

Over the last five years, as Intercom’s Engineering organisation has grown from 2 founding engineers to over 80 people, we’ve learned a lot about leadership and management. At this event we’ll share openly and candidly some of what we’ve learned and how we support our people on that journey.

The talks cover what we believe are the three core competencies of engineering management.

We’ve come to think of the role of Engineering Manager as consisting of 3 core competencies:

• People management
• Team management
• Engineering Excellence

TALKS

People Management

Rich Archbold, our Director of Platform engineering, will explain why as an engineering manager, the majority of your leverage comes through those on your team. Which is why you need to focus your energy where it matters most: the people. Challenge each person on your team to succeed while helping them to have impact.

Team Management

Ultimately, your goal is to build great products that are valuable to customers and advance your team and company’s mission. So David Lynch, Engineering Manager for our Pipeline team, will explain why you must care deeply about the strategy for your team. You need to develop a roadmap that supports your strategy and you need to make, guide and deliver on plans that enable you to complete your roadmap.

Engineering Excellence

A team of motivated growing engineers, aligned around a strategy, count for nothing if you’re not shipping great product that’s fast, scalable, reliable, high quality and well designed. Cormac McGuire will talk through the engineering skills and behaviors that an engineering manager needs to be able to do this well.

Panel discussion

Brian Scanlan, Engineering Manager on our Infrastructure team will join the speakers for a Q&A session, MC’d by John Looney

There’s no single path to becoming a great engineering leader, so we hope to have some great conversations with everyone that helps us all grow and be better.

Drinks and Pizza will be available.

Doors 6.30pm

Any questions? Mail pamela@intercom.com.