A year ago, all engineers at ShopBack reported directly to the CTO. We had no Engineering Managers (EM), no team leads, and in other words - no structure. Recognising this as a rising issue for a start-up with a 250% year-on-year growth rate, we hired a VP Engineering to put a proper structure in place. Introducing engineering managers was a paradigm shift he proposed which had an outsized impact on the engineering team.

We grew from:

• Zero to seven EMs
• One to three engineering centers
• Fifteen engineers to more than fifty engineers

The biggest game-changer for me was my role switch from Senior Engineer to Engineering Manager within a week. In this post, I would like to share some of my learnings over the first year of transition, especially what I wished I understood before I started down the path of management.