Over the past 4 years at Monzo, I’ve had the privilege of  supporting lots of Engineering Managers (EMs) as their onboarding buddy, peer, or manager. I’ve also had the pleasure of interviewing a lot of EM candidates.

A common question I get is around expectations for EMs at Monzo.

The other is about what kind of support they should expect from their managers.

To answer some of these questions, our Engineering Manager Progression Framework is publicly available. It lays out our expectations for each level along the Engineering Management career ladder. It’s not a checklist, and more of a map than a GPS.

To complement it, I wrote the document you’ll find below. It is tightly aligned with our framework, and offers some practical guidance on how to apply it to your day to day, and what support to expect as a manager walking the walk.

This document has evolved over time, and I can’t take sole credit for it. Early on, this blog post by Chase Seibert served as inspiration for its structure. Over time, as I evolved it, I sought feedback from folks who used it to navigate their early days at Monzo, as well as feedback from other senior leaders at Monzo. All of them helped refine it, and helped me make sure it’s a useful resource.

It’s written from the perspective of a manager of managers. “You” is you – an Engineering Manager –, and “I” is your manager – typically a Senior Engineering Manager or Engineering Director.

Below I’ve laid out the expectations for managers reporting to me. Most of these should feel familiar if you've managed before. They are not boxes to be ticked but concerns and behaviours that will help you and your team succeed.

Let’s talk about anything that doesn’t feel right, or feels challenging for you.

You drive, and I’ll provide support.

I trust you to work with your team to make great decisions.

I will always be here to support you according to your needs but not to make choices for you. My support might include showing you the ropes, pairing with you, challenging your decisions to help you reason about them, or suggesting ways forward if you want them.

My support and coaching should feel relevant, valuable, and always encourage your growth.

Your timely feedback will help me help you better.

Our performance is evaluated based on our track record of delivering business impact.

Our biggest lever for creating business value is helping our teams ship the right thing consistently and efficiently.

There will be times when we execute flawlessly but the impact doesn't materialise as hoped.

Depending on our domain, our appetite for risk should be different. For example, growth initiatives will typically carry a different risk appetite than platform initiatives. It’s important to consider the risk appetite for each bet you’re making. A growth team nailing 10/10 bets should probably be more ambitious!

When we don’t have the desired impact, we and the team should learn why to inform the ensuing bets.

At Monzo, EMs are expected to lead the team in reasoning through disproven hypotheses, and determine a way forward.

Each engineering manager is accountable for their portfolio of projects, and their total impact. Part of our job is to influence the roadmap towards high impact work, refine the scope so that it actually does have impact, and deliver quickly so that we can fail and learn fast.

You own the path to delivery, which includes proactively working through cross-team dependencies, securing leadership buy-in, and adapting when priorities shift. You should use me as an escalation point if you’ve tried solving things yourself, and believe you need support.

You, your Product Manager (PM) peers, and your cross functional partners should be in sync.

Great 360 feedback is one that evidences a highly functional and outcome-driven relationship, including challenging each other to be more ambitious together.

This means not shying away from conflict or compromising when there are disagreements.

You’ll have a trusting relationship in place where disagreements reveal opportunities, and you’ll be able to influence and be influenced by your peers to drive great outcomes.

Consider how you’ll proactively offer and request feedback to and from your cross-functional peers to foster a mutual growth relationship.

It’s unlikely that a dysfunctional relationship between you and your cross-functional peers will result in good outcomes. If needed, I can dive in to understand what’s happening and improve it as a top priority.

As you get up to speed, you'll develop strong opinions about our strategy and roadmap. Once you understand the domain well enough, actively shape that roadmap with your PM partners.

At Monzo, EMs and PMs are jointly accountable for the product decisions, and for working with stakeholders to design a strategy for their area, and determine which bets we should take.

What if there’s a cross-functional vacuum in your area?

You should escalate to get support, but you’ll still be accountable for determining the best possible roadmap given the perspectives you have available, and then use it to unblock progress.

Not all your bets need to be winners, but they will likely be strengthened by those around you. Seek their opinions out.

I'll share thoughts and suggestions regularly, but treat them as perspectives to consider rather than instructions to follow. What matters is that you and your PM dig into whether they make sense.

You are accountable for the short and long term technical outcomes of your team.

Find the right moments to guide technical decisions – enough to influence the direction of travel, but not so much that the team becomes dependent on you at every turn.

There’s no expectation that you will write code alongside your team to deliver business impact.

You can do this, but it will be an additive activity, and it can hurt Monzo and our customers if you become a bottleneck for the team.

Instead, you should look for ways to act as a multiplier to your teams’ technical outcomes.

A great way to do this is to develop your leadership bench, help them define success for a technical strategy, and then coach them throughout its implementation, removing yourself as a hard dependency. This is a multiplicative effect, and more impactful in the long run.

As your manager, expect me to show interest and offer perspectives on technical strategy and approaches to larger challenges. When I do, treat my ideas and suggestions like those coming from the rest of the team.

When you commit to a deliverable and a deadline, your commitments must matter.

There will still be times when your existing commitments are not the right call anymore. This is when you'll need to communicate clearly and widely why you need to change your plans and what the new plan looks like.

Make bad news flow much faster than good news – it’s the best way to ensure timely support.

When teams don’t meet a commitment, EMs are expected to guide the team - including their cross-functional peers - so it grows its ability to deliver predictably. The scope of this guidance can range from estimation, project management, to goal setting, to name a few. It will be situational, and will depend on team needs.

The ideal state is a team that can easily tweak a project’s scope, polish, and timelines, to meet any reasonable deadline with a reasonable deliverable. A reasonable deliverable is one that delivers or exceeds the business impact you committed to.

You can count on my support to help you turn 🔴into 🟢, and to jump in to help identify and mitigate large risks that could derail us.

When in doubt, optimise for Monzo's success over your local team.

As you grow into the role, think company > collective > team > individual (including yourself).

This is a core expectation for any leadership position.

What is a collective? At Monzo, “collective” is what we call a business unit.

While you are onboarding, it will feel natural to prioritise optimising for your local teams first, as a temporary proxy for company-wide prioritisation. As you grow your network and develop a wider business context, it will be important to optimise for the company more.

Leaning towards improving the larger org will consistently deliver an outsized impact:

You’ll take part in recruiting, interviewing, and hiring great engineers to join Monzo.

Some of these engineers will join your team and become your direct reports.

Each of your reports deserves a great manager.

Aim to onboard, coach, and support each individual according to their specific needs, and take active part in their growth and development.

You are accountable for retaining your team

Each of them should have a career trajectory that both of you planned and understand. They are responsible for putting in the effort, but you are accountable for managing the outcome. When they are ready, you’ll be the primary advocate for their promotion.

Your team deserves a great manager too.

We hold a high bar for performance, and you’ll ensure it is upheld. The individual needs of any report should not supersede the needs of the team. It will be important for you to have systems in place to understand how folks are performing, and what kind of support they need.

When you detect risk of negative impact for the team, act fast but empathetically to uncover the facts, the root cause, and support the individual while solving the problem for the team.

Myself and our people partners are your primary sources of support to navigate performance cases.

At Monzo, we run a yearly performance review cycle. You’ll lead this process for your area with my support, alongside other EMs in our collective.

Your team's ability to do their best work depends on feeling safe to speak up, make mistakes, and challenge ideas without fear.

When people feel safe, they share better ideas, give honest feedback, and collaborate more effectively.

They grow themselves, they grow each other, and they grow the team.

EMs (and all leaders at Monzo) are accountable for creating and protecting this environment.

Lead by example. Be vulnerable about your own mistakes and uncertainties. Ask for feedback regularly and act on what you hear. Show that disagreements are valuable rather than threatening.

Make safety visible. When someone challenges an idea and it leads to a better outcome, celebrate that publicly. When you mess up, own it openly and focus on what the team learned.

Stay calm under pressure. When incidents happen or deadlines are at risk, your team will look to you for stability. Panic is contagious, but so is calm leadership.

Pay attention to team dynamics. Are quieter team members contributing? Do people feel comfortable disagreeing with more senior folks or challenging popular ideas? Are retrospectives honest or just polite?

Hire for cultural fit. Technical skills matter, but so does someone's ability to give and receive feedback constructively.

The best signal that safety is working will be people giving each other feedback freely, including feedback to you. If that flow stops, dig in quickly – safety is much harder to rebuild than maintain. You are accountable for taking action to reestablish safety.

Meetings we are in should have a purpose, a known agenda, the right people in the room, and reach the desired outcomes on time. Those outcomes should be shared with the rest of the team. Actions should be owned by a single accountable person, and have a known deadline.

As an EM, you’ll be attending and often leading meetings in your area. Even when it’s a meeting run by a cross-functional peer, you should take responsibility for making sure it’s well run.

Each of us is accountable for the lifecycle of the actions we take on. I'll follow through on anything I agree to do, and if I can't deliver, I'll let you know as soon as I realise it.

How you run your 1:1s is 100% up to you, but they should deliver clear value.

I’d encourage you to find a way to provide continuous feedback and support. A weekly cadence tends to help for direct reports and your closest PMs. For other cross-functional peers or staff engineers, aim for a regular but not overwhelming cadence. Let folks reschedule as needed but don’t skip these too often.

Try to make them a safe space, default to transparency, and encourage constructive challenges and feedback.

If your reports, peers, or stakeholders need urgent support, please be reachable (but not necessarily available) outside of your regular 1:1s. How you deal with and prioritise these ad-hoc requests is completely up to you.

Regularly review who you're meeting with and whether those relationships are driving good outcomes for everyone involved.

As your manager, I’ll schedule regular 1:1s with your most senior engineers and PM peers to stay connected and offer support. You'll get full visibility into these conversations - both the feedback I gather and any development opportunities we discuss together.

Our customers rely on what we ship, so operational excellence matters.

You'll work with your team to balance technical debt with feature delivery. Before things break, have a proactive plan to address accumulated debt.

Ensure your team has on-call coverage and can respond to incidents effectively. When issues arise, lead or support incident response and guide blameless postmortems that improve future outcomes.

At Monzo, we’re hard on problems and not on people.

Managers should embody that at every turn, but especially when the stakes are high. When things break, we fix problems for customers first. Then we work to understand what went wrong and how to prevent it happening again. Finally, we share our learnings across the business to make future incidents less likely and Monzo more resilient.

If this document helps you, or If you have any questions and would like to discuss them with me, please drop me a line on linkedin, or email me at diogomatias@monzo.com. 

If you identify with this approach to leadership and management and are considering the next step in your career, we’re hiring! ;)