Published January 13, 2022 · 4 min read

What would a manager as a service look like? What kind of systems would a manager resemble? How can you describe a manager’s responsibility through various systems?

Here’s my take.

A manager is like an integrated development environment such as IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio, or Xcode. The role is not about writing the code. The role is about improving the environment where the code gets written. A manager helps engineers become more productive, gives guidance based on context, and reduces friction. A manager should also be technical enough to understand what is going on and challenge poor decisions before they become bigger problems. The role is part of the system around the code.

Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ, Prometheus, Nagios, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Nagios

Engineering Manager Tasks

A manager is also like a message broker such as Kafka, Pulsar, or RabbitMQ. Many requests arrive from product, leadership, operations, support, incidents, and dependencies. If all of that pressure goes directly to engineers, the team loses focus. A manager takes the pressure, routes requests properly, delays some, rejects some, and escalates when needed. In that sense, a manager applies backpressure to the organization so the team does not burn out. This is one of the main parts of the role because management is naturally interrupt-driven while engineering needs longer focus.

A manager is also like a metric collector such as Prometheus or Nagios. The role is to use signals to make goals and objectives clearer. Metrics help a manager spot risks, misalignment, repeated blockers, and weak ownership. If the same type of issue keeps happening, the manager should see it early and take action before the problem gets messy. Metrics become a way to understand the health of the team and the direction of the work.

A manager is also like a load balancer such as Nginx or HAProxy. Work should not be distributed blindly. The manager should understand the number of people in the team, their strengths, their growth areas, and their current load. The role is to spread work in a way that keeps delivery moving without overloading the same people again and again. This also includes invisible work such as follow-ups, coordination, onboarding, documentation, and alignment. Teams depend on this type of work more than they admit. If a manager does not notice it, the same people carry it forever.

A manager is also like an orchestration system such as Kubernetes. The role is to roll out engineering strategy in a controlled way. If something goes wrong, the manager should notice it early and adjust. A manager creates enough structure so ownership is clear, decisions are clear, and priorities are clear. This matters because without structure, power does not disappear. It becomes implicit. Then people rely on politics, noise, and guesswork. The manager gives the system a cleaner shape.

A manager is also like a garbage collector. Over time, teams accumulate things that should have been removed long ago: obsolete meetings, unclear roles, unowned tasks, repeated confusion, and process waste. If nobody cleans them up, they stay in the system and keep slowing everything down. A manager is responsible for reducing that operational debt so the team can keep moving.

A manager is also like an API. Engineers should not have to directly deal with every internal system of the company. The manager becomes an interface for budget requests, promotions, escalations, feedback, and decision-making. The role is to expose the right functions of the organization in a usable way.

A manager is also like an ETL pipeline. Business goals, customer pain points, budget constraints, and stakeholder pressure do not arrive in a form engineers can directly work with. A manager extracts the important signals, transforms them into something clear and actionable, and loads that context into the team. The role is to make messages usable.

This is why I like the phrase manager as a service.

It shifts the idea of management away from supervision and closer to enablement. The manager is there to provide internal services that help the team execute better. These include context, pressure handling, load balancing, risk detection, coordination, and accountability.

Still, the role cannot be reduced only to service. A manager is not just a service desk. The role also includes ownership. Sometimes the manager has to make unpopular decisions, push back, force clarity, and deal with problems directly. Without that part, the role turns into administration.

That, to me, is manager as a service.