How to become a Engineer Manager ?

Here is some not for How to become a Engineer Manager ?

  1. Why you change the company ?
    1. Introduction
      • Say project that matched with the compnay
      • If you said you manage a team with 15 members, but they find people manage 5 people → Cause mismatch
      • Try to find the match when they introduce company
    2. Why you change the job
      • Good answer 1: Always worked in mature and stabilized systems, want to build something from scratch.
      • Worst answer 2: I do not want to context-switching in projects ⇒ If the company is start-up, they will lose-lose situation.
      • Performance Gap: Move from big company to smaller organization
      • Want to fast-paced start-up environment: Move from big company to start-up.
      • Lay-off: Normal in big tech company like Amazon, Google,… but not small company.
    3. Happy to go
      • If you show that you can grow and thrive in this environment ⇒ win-win solution.
    4. Not happy but go
      • Maybe question about performance issues.
      • Talk
        • Step 1: Your win and achievements.
        • Step 2: Share about primary reason: opinition, do not match with team,…
        • Step 3: How you are great match for the current role.
    5. Inverted, Always inverted
      • If another people tell you the story, do you trust it ?
    6. Prepare story bank
      • Hiring and form team.
      • Leadership style: people, product, technical, execution
      • Critical feedback
      • Conflict mangement
      • Project execution
      • High-performance team
      • Change management

      ⇒ Prepare so that you can show your work

    7. Team structure + Vision and KPI
      • Describe the structure of the team.
      • Because a team member may leave ⇒ need to build structure from scratch today.
      • Focus on the vision of the team.
    8. Do you have any questions ?
      • Ask question to show your interest
      • Ask about the challenges in the domain ?
      • Ask about the responsibilities ?
  2. From “Hire” to “Strong Hire”
    1. Bring values
      • People
        • Team
        • Boss
        • Stakeholder
        • Customer
      • Company
        • Business impact: business goals.
        • Product KPIs
      • Technical
        • Architecture, scalability, performance, availability
        • Throughput (RPS), Latency, Bottleneck, Storage.
      • Execution
    2. Proactive but not reactive
      • Weekness + How to improve for better
    3. Do not do something
      • Bad-mouthing your boss, organization
      • Show lack of empathy.
      • Show lack of challenging work in current role.
      • Over individuals > team
    4. Some roles
      • Architect: technical depth and system design skills.
      • EM: collaborate skills + maintain high-performance team.
      • PM: work with cross-functional, skateholders, align engineer with business need.
    5. Job of EM
      • Project execution (viennd): plan, execute and deliver complex tasks.
      • Project eadership (anhnd3): mentor, grow and build high-performance team
    6. Organization style
      • Start-up: focus on execution and hands-on ability.
      • Large Enterprises: mentor, grow, build high-peforming teams while aligning with organizational processes and culture.
      • Traffic in high scale (50k+ rps): distributed system, performance optimization, reliability engineering.
      • B2B company: focus on code quality and how to mange customer needs.
      • Security company: focus on security-first mindset to fostering the culture of secure practices.
  3. What is your leadership style ?
    1. People leadership:
      • How you add value for people around you: internal team, skateholders.
      • Example: 1-1 meeting with all members to understand where they are, where they want to go.
    2. Business impact
      • Strategic thinking for business
      • Reach organization goals.
      • Example: Align team vision with company goals.
    3. Technical excellence
      • System Design, clarify the unknown and failures.
      • Example: Feature delivery (80%), Tech debt reduction (20%).
    4. Execution excellence
      • Predictablity
      • Quality
      • Example: Add checkpoint to check the progress
  4. Strengths and weaknesses
    1. Start-up:
      • Bias for action
      • Adaptability
    2. Large organization:
      • People leadership
      • Scaling team
      • Cross-collaboration.
    3. Weaknesses
      • Improve communication
        • Need to clarify and transparency.
        • Two-way communication.
      • Enhance career development opportuinites
        • Salary
        • Growth in career: increase title, allow members to collaborate with senior members from other team to learn.
      • Cross-team collaboration and alignment
    4. What do you to build the team
      • Phase 1 (Understanding):
        • Build relationship with skateholders and internal team.
        • Understand company vision, goals and priorities.
        • Understand team KPIs and how it meet with business goals.
        • Dive deep in technical stack.
      • Phase 2 (Contributing):
        • Where I can add value and priority ?
        • Build trust and momentum with peers and team.
        • Develop mid and long-term improvements
      • Phase 3 (execution)
        • Contributing in business and technical goals.
        • Implement improvements in process, and team practices.
        • Align with team priority and deliver the visible impact.
  5. Hiring Framework
    1. Strategy
      • Vision: long-term goals and objectives.
      • Roadmap: Vision + Timeline + Metric
    2. Team needs
      • Skills: the technical and soft skills needed.
      • Diversity: a team with multiple backgrounds, personalities ⇒ collaborate to reach the goal.
      • Complexity: The difficulty of the project ⇒ scale of the team will be working on.
      • Culture fit: collaborate, communicate and adapability in a team.
    3. Contrains:
      • Team size
      • Budget
      • Time-line
    4. Process
      • Sourcing: Finding the qualified candidate.
      • Evaluation: Method to test the candidate: interviews, technical assessments, reviews.
      • Onboarding: check whether new hires into a team.
  6. Team Framework
    1. Pyramid Structure
      • Pros: cost effective, junior can learn and grow.
      • Cons: mentor overhead.
    2. Diamond Structure
      • Pros: Balance the delivery experience.
      • Higher cost but lack innovation limits.
    3. T-shape structure
      • Pros: Specialised and Innovative projects.
      • Cons: Bottleneck for senior path, higher costs.
    4. Flat structure
      • Pros: Smaller teams or start-ups.
      • Cons: Role ambiguity.
  7. Example
    • Data gathering
    • Hiring framework
    • Form team
    • Feedback to update the behaviour interview.
  8. How to answer the interview
    • Must know what they want to hear.
    • Project → Hiring Strategy → Long-term
  9. People Leadership
    • Conflict: Find solution for both 2 people, pros and cons trade-offs for must-have logic.
    • Feedback: Always listen from 2 sides of people.
    • Have difficulty: Not blame, find action to solve it.
    • Difficult People: Coach them to mentoring roles, to share experience for others to build trust. (nhu trị bằng cương, cương trị bằng nhu)
  10. Performance Management
    • Grow talented member to senior: To keep them.
    • Reward strong performers
  11. Skateholder Management
    • Stakeholder map: Think this a system design each department of the company ⇒ Clarify scope by domain-driven.
    • Conflict between stakeholders: Balance all, or depend on the strongest stakeholder.
    • Stakeholders disagree with you: find common ground, deal to match the delivery.
    • How to keep track timeline skateholders: weekly meeting (1 hình thức dí)
    • Unrealistic stakeholders: chia phe thôi, find people with strong influencer and high interest to support you.
  12. Project execution
    • Example
      • Must-have: English, DSA, Structure answer.
      • Should Have: Golang concurrency, Java concurrency, Redis, Kafka, MySQL dive deep.
      • Could have: Dating and relationships.
      • Won’t have
    • Narrow the scopes for win-win and motivate employee ?
      • Find anyway to reduce cost cut.
      • Increase bandwidth: motivate + hiring.
      • Stakeholder management: align win-win scope or choose the most value stakeholder.
    • Technical dive deep in system design ?
      • Writes: MySQL + Kafka Stream
      • Reads: Cache
      • Concurrency: Using goroutines and threads in Golang and Java.
      • Scalability: Kubernetes scales to 100 pods.
    • Do not blame, find the root cause to solve it.
    • Project trade-offs, long-terms and short-terms
      • Short-term first + strict in code structure and convention ⇒ logging error.
      • Must long-term later.
  13. Engineering Excellent
    • Use metrics to monitor each product: Mean time to recovery, error rates,…
    • Business impact: metrics like user acquisition, transaction valume, revenue.
    • Delivery & Efficiency: how to operate and devlier a product.
    • Quality: Bugs count, Mean time to repair.
    • Team satisfaction: conduct 1-1 meeting.
  14. Diversity, Equality and Inclusion
    • Focus on: Inclusion
    • Diversity:
      • Different age, gender
      • Understand the different needs of talent pool.
    • Equity:
      • Increase engagement score.
    • Inclusion (cảm giác được thuộc về)
      • Feel they are welcomed and appreciated.
November 23, 2025