The New EM's First 100 Days (Hold the Motivational Poster)
You are experienced and you are also the new person. How to spend the first months without faceplanting.
Walking into a new company as an experienced engineering manager is humbling in a very specific way. You know exactly how much you don't know yet, and everyone is watching to see whether you'll pretend otherwise.
Don't pretend. Everyone already knows you're the new one. The only open question is whether you do.
Start with 1:1s, and actually listen. Not the status-update kind. The kind where you ask what's slowing them down and then close your mouth. Your team can smell a manager performing interest from across the open plan. One real question beats ten from a skip-level template: "On a scale from fine to dumpster fire, how's the workload - straight answer." You'll learn more from three of those than from a month of dashboards.
Every company has its own house style of balagan. Your job in month one is to map it, not fix it. Deadlines always slipping? Could be process, could be one overloaded person, could be requirements written in crayon. Quiet resentment instead of an argument? That's the expensive one. It means people decided it's no longer worth saying. Don't reach for blame. Reach for "tell me more about that," and pay attention to what nobody says out loud.
Have a 100-day plan. Expect it dead by day 12. A direction you adjust beats no direction. Find the obvious early wins - the ancient approval step everyone hates, the code reviews that sit for six hours - and clear them. Nothing builds credibility faster than deleting a process everyone assumed was load-bearing and watching the building stay up.
And know the firefights are coming. One I still think about: an "innocent" enrichment tweak in our Flink pipeline, a quiet timezone conversion, and certain events simply stopped existing. Nobody noticed until the numbers downstream in ClickHouse went sideways, during the pre-Black-Friday code freeze, half the team on vacation, naturally. Someone had "helpfully" changed replicated_deduplication_window. Unpicking that while talking executives off the ledge was not, let's say, in my 100-day plan.
page tag --> collectors --> Kafka --> Flink (enrich) --> ClickHouse
timezone bug ^ bad numbers ^
Last thing, the one new EMs skip: protect yourself. Not because self-care is a poster in the kitchen. Because a fried manager makes worse calls, and your team inherits every single one of them. The boundaries you actually keep are the boundaries they're allowed to keep too. You are quietly answering the question of whether this place is a sprint or somewhere a person can stay.
You were hired for your experience. Experience does not mean walking in with answers. It means walking in with sharper questions and the nerve to say out loud what you haven't figured out yet. Do that, kill two stupid processes, survive the first fire, and people start trusting you. That trust is the only thing that holds when something actually breaks.
Most days you are not the hero. You're the crash test dummy. Show up anyway.