The last twelve months have been integral in our continuous effort to refine and improve our delivery process both for our engineers and our customers. In June 2018, we started a pilot program creating the role of Engineering Manager on our Delivery Services teams. The pilot proved to be successful in the first 25 teams, so starting in 2019, we’ve expanded to roughly 120 teams and plan to add more in the future.
The Engineering Manager role has developed into an essential part of our delivery at Unosquare because it focuses on people. We know that our company wouldn’t be successful and we wouldn’t be able to consistently deliver results to our clients without our dedicated and talented employees. We make their success our priority, and we believe adding this role to our teams is another tool in our kit. Our Engineering Managers are people with the skills of a manager, mentor, and coach with a strong technical background who can help team members to better connect and communicate with their team leads and with each other helping teams to do their best.
We understood there was a gap in the way team members were connecting with team leads and managers and started looking for individuals inside the company with several years of experience who we thought would be ideal people to bridge that gap. We needed individuals who could coach and mentor engineers to help them build relationships, plan professional growth, and overall help them have a stronger voice in our company.
We currently have eight Engineering Managers who work with 120 team leads, reaching about 350 engineers. They meet quarterly in one-on-one settings to help team members grow both as experts in their technologies but also as productive team members. They provide feedback on technical and soft skills, discuss their relationship with the client and with Unosquare, create professional growth plans, and develop any action items needed. We believe that this added communication strengthens the working relationships throughout the company and aids in creating a more fulfilling work experience.
Our vision is to keep investing in educating our Engineering Managers and training them in leadership, mentoring, and the skills to manage difficult conversations. Shortly, we plan to add more Engineering Managers and continue to refine our process with the feedback we are collecting now. The next step is to apply the lessons we learned to the next phase of creating a more formal program for our Team Leads with additional focus on education and leadership training.
With active Engineering Managers and Team Leads working well together, we can provide our clients with efficiency in processes and build on our track record of successful delivery at Unosquare.
