DevOpsDays Austin 2026 - You Are the Micro-CTO: Managing Your Team to Effectiveness
Engineering managers are often framed as exclusively as people-supporters: unblocking engineers, shielding them from meetings, deferring on technical decisions. But that framing leaves many EMs accountable for outcomes they can’t control.
This talk argues that the EM is the micro-CTO of their team, responsible for actively designing the systems around Product (what you’re building), Engineering (how you’re building it), and People (who’s building it).
Drawing on real stories of teams that were slowly failing, burning out, or struggling to stabilize, it shows how things improved once managers stopped working harder on individuals and started fixing the misalignments between those three areas.