5 Key Challenges for Engineering Managers – InApps

5 Key Challenges for Engineering Managers – InApps is an article under the topic Devops Many of you are most interested in today !! Today, let’s InApps.net learn 5 Key Challenges for Engineering Managers – InApps in today’s post !

Key Summary

• Overview: The article by InApps Technology identifies five critical challenges faced by engineering managers in 2022, focusing on leadership, team dynamics, and technical oversight in software development. It highlights Vietnam’s role as a hub for engineering talent, offering cost-effective solutions to support engineering management.

• What are Engineering Manager Challenges?:
  • Definition: Engineering managers face obstacles in balancing technical leadership, team management, and organizational goals, requiring skills in communication, prioritization, and strategic planning.
  • Purpose: Addressing these challenges ensures team productivity, project success, and career growth for engineers.
  • Context: In 2022, rapid technological advancements, remote work, and global competition amplify the complexity of engineering management roles.
• 5 Key Challenges for Engineering Managers:
  • 1. Balancing Technical and People Management:
    • Challenge: Managers must oversee technical decisions while fostering team morale and resolving interpersonal conflicts.
    • Details: Requires switching between coding reviews, architectural discussions, and one-on-one meetings. Over-focusing on technical tasks can neglect team growth.
    • Impact: Poor balance leads to disengaged teams or technical debt.
    • Example: A manager spends 70% of time coding, causing delayed performance reviews and team frustration.
  • 2. Managing Distributed and Remote Teams:
    • Challenge: Leading globally distributed or remote teams introduces issues with time zones, communication, and cultural differences.
    • Details: Tools like Slack, Zoom, and Jira help, but maintaining team cohesion and visibility into progress is difficult. Miscommunication can delay projects.
    • Impact: Reduced collaboration and misalignment on goals.
    • Example: A U.S.-Vietnam team struggles with a 12-hour time difference, delaying sprint planning.
  • 3. Prioritizing and Managing Technical Debt:
    • Challenge: Balancing new feature development with addressing technical debt (e.g., outdated code, poor architecture) under tight deadlines.
    • Details: Requires strategic prioritization to allocate time for refactoring or upgrading systems without derailing product roadmaps.
    • Impact: Ignoring technical debt increases maintenance costs and risks system failures.
    • Example: A SaaS platform crashes due to unaddressed legacy code, costing $50K in downtime.
  • 4. Hiring and Retaining Top Talent:
    • Challenge: Attracting skilled engineers and retaining them in a competitive market with high demand for tech talent.
    • Details: Involves crafting compelling job descriptions, conducting rigorous interviews, and offering growth opportunities. High turnover disrupts project continuity.
    • Impact: Talent shortages delay projects; onboarding new hires slows momentum.
    • Example: A startup loses a senior developer to a competitor, delaying a product launch by 3 months.
  • 5. Aligning Engineering Goals with Business Objectives:
    • Challenge: Ensuring engineering efforts support broader business goals, such as revenue growth or customer satisfaction, while maintaining technical excellence.
    • Details: Requires clear communication with stakeholders, translating business needs into technical requirements, and managing scope creep.
    • Impact: Misalignment leads to wasted resources or missed market opportunities.
    • Example: An engineering team builds a feature that doesn’t meet customer needs, requiring costly rework.
• Benefits of Addressing These Challenges:
  • Productivity: Effective management boosts team output and project delivery.
  • Team Morale: Strong leadership fosters engagement and reduces turnover.
  • Innovation: Prioritizing technical debt and talent enables cutting-edge solutions.
  • Cost Efficiency: Offshore engineering support in Vietnam ($20–$50/hour via InApps) saves 20–40% vs. U.S./EU rates ($80–$150/hour).
  • Alignment: Syncing engineering and business goals drives organizational success.
• Challenges in Overcoming These Issues:
  • Time Constraints: Managers juggle multiple responsibilities, limiting focus on strategic tasks.
  • Skill Gaps: Technical expertise may not translate to strong leadership or communication skills.
  • Resource Limitations: Budgets may restrict hiring or tool investments.
  • Cultural Barriers: Managing diverse, remote teams requires cultural sensitivity.
• Security and Management Considerations:
  • Access Control: Use RBAC for project tools (e.g., GitHub, Jira) to protect sensitive code and data.
  • Communication Security: Encrypt remote team communications with TLS in Zoom or Slack.
  • Compliance: Ensure hiring and data practices meet GDPR or SOC 2 standards.
  • Example: InApps implements MFA and encrypted Jira workflows for a U.S. client’s distributed team.
• Use Cases:
  • Startups: Managing lean teams to deliver MVPs while addressing technical debt.
  • Enterprises: Aligning large engineering teams with corporate goals for digital transformation.
  • SaaS: Retaining talent to maintain scalable, reliable platforms.
  • E-commerce: Leading remote teams to support high-traffic systems.
  • Fintech: Balancing security and innovation in regulated environments.
• InApps Technology’s Role:
  • Leading HCMC-based provider with 500+ experts in software development, DevOps, and engineering management support.
  • Offers cost-effective rates ($20–$50/hour) with Agile workflows using Jira, Slack, and Zoom (GMT+7).
  • Assists engineering managers by providing skilled developers, remote team coordination, and tools for managing technical debt and project alignment.
  • Example: InApps augments a U.S. startup’s engineering team with Vietnamese developers, reducing hiring costs by 35% and accelerating delivery.
• Recommendations:
  • Delegate technical tasks to senior engineers to focus on people management.
  • Use collaboration tools (e.g., Slack, Jira) and asynchronous communication for remote teams.
  • Allocate 20% of sprint time to address technical debt strategically.
  • Partner with InApps Technology for cost-effective talent and management support, leveraging Vietnam’s expertise to overcome engineering challenges.

Read more about 5 Key Challenges for Engineering Managers – InApps at Wikipedia

You can find content about 5 Key Challenges for Engineering Managers – InApps from the Wikipedia website

Shahar Fogel

Shahar is the CEO of Rookout. He’s spent the last 2 decades leading data-driven businesses, products and R&D teams, from early-stage start-ups to government organizations. Shahar is passionate about software architecture and observability. He is a Cambridge University MBA alumni.

The pandemic has forced many teams to either accelerate their digital transformation initiatives or start them sooner than they expected to have to. And that’s mostly a good thing. The PwC US CFO Pulse Survey asked finance leaders which programs they wanted to protect versus cut; programs that were firmly in the “protect” camp were customer experience, cybersecurity and (you guessed it) digital transformation.

But with digital transformation comes new challenges. As a technology provider, I wanted to understand those challenges intimately, in order to build software that better suits the needs of our customers in this new reality. So we conducted a survey to dig a little deeper, and have published the results in our new report: Top Digital Transformation Challenges for Engineering Managers.

1. Maintaining Productivity and Velocity

While cloud native apps have their benefits — mainly that they make it easier and more cost-effective to scale up and scale out easily — they also bring a new set of challenges that may cause frustration in engineering teams. Observability and understandability tools are striving to address these new challenges, so organizations can avoid the headaches of developing their own tools and methods for troubleshooting cloud native applications.

2. Resolving Customer Issues

Half of the respondents to our survey reported that it can take over two weeks on average to resolve customer issues. That is far too long and demonstrates that there are still serious improvements that need to be made at many organizations around being more agile. It’s worth highlighting that companies who embrace shift-left and agile methodologies resolve customer issues much faster (within 24-48 hours).

3. Balancing Speed and Quality

I like to call this the “fly slow or fly blind” dilemma. Today, developers are mostly measured on how fast they deliver new products to market (velocity). But at the same time, we are seeing a sharper focus on the reliability of these services, with the rise of SRE and other IT Ops practices. Unfortunately, the improvement of one can lead to a negative effect on the other. In other words, shipping features faster often means reducing the quality of those features; and on the other hand, investing in practices like chaos engineering and distributed tracing can take away engineering efforts from developing new products. Ideally, DevOps means both worlds work closer together for maximum results.

4. Distributed Workforces

By now, most of us have gotten used to working from home and taking meetings virtually. But it’s undeniable that something is lost when you can’t just pop over to a co-worker’s desk to solve a problem or a pesky bug. When respondents were asked, ‘What is the greatest challenge holding you and your team back?’, they reported that debugging and efficient coding were the biggest challenges. Next was the challenge of knowledge transfer and collaboration. To deal with this, many teams are still using traditional logging and APM tools, which often require tedious processes that take up too much time and resources.

5. Remote Debugging

“Forty-five percent of respondents reported that they or their teams debug 5-10 hours per week, and over 30% debug even more than that.”

As all developers know or have experienced, traditional debuggers simply don’t work as efficiently with cloud native technologies. Many developers continue to use them, whether by preference or due to a lack of proper tooling. According to IDC, “The increase in applications that are developed and deployed on the cloud means that development teams are spending more and more time debugging increasingly complex, dynamic, remotely deployed code.”

By continuing to use traditional debuggers, software engineers find themselves in a situation where they need to push through the pain of inefficient tooling and end up either writing a ton more logs, going without the necessary data needed to debug, or a myriad of other options that are painful and time-consuming. The solution is adopting the proper tool: a modern debugging solution that’s built for cloud native applications. Developers will be able to get the data they need from their code, no matter where it’s run.

InApps is a wholly owned subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: Velocity.

Feature image via Pixabay.

Source: InApps.net