Guide for new engineering managers

Empower your journey as a new engineering manager with our essential step-by-step guide for success and effective team management.
The article provides a step-by-step guide for new managers at Indigo, with required and optional items to ensure they have all the necessary resources and training available. The guide includes scheduling a handover meeting with the current team manager to discuss recent feedback, projects, individual goals, and shared documents or performance reviews. The article is written by Adam C. Conrad, an Engineering Manager at Meta, who is also an advisor, speaker, and writer. The reading time for the article is 2 minutes.
Original article: Becoming an engineering manager
The agent-shaped org chart
Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.
AI as staff, not software
Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.
Knowledge work was never work
Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.
The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
The worker isn't lying. The worker is reporting what it thought it did, which is always one step removed from what the world actually shows. The fix isn't more self-honesty. The fix is a different pair of eyes.
Shopping is the last mile
Every meal planning app treats cooking as the hard problem and shopping as a logistics detail. They have it backwards. Cooking is mostly solved. Shopping is the last mile.
Watch what they buy, not what they say
Forms ask people to declare preferences. Receipts record what they did. The gap between the two is where revealed preference lives, and it's wider than most product teams admit.
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