Engineering Leadership

PandaDoc EM 2026 Handbook

Source: Google Docs

The Business problem we are trying to solve

Understanding the core challenges and our hypothesis for improvement

In short: Improve Delivery

  • Meeting deadlines, being able to commit on time, and scope.
  • High throughput with low waste, no blockers, and short iterations.
  • Quality of Technical decisions to minimize incidents, regressions, or the general need for rework.
The above is expected to influence a major lagging indicator: ARR per employee.

Diagnosis: What's challenging for our EMs

  • EMs have too many reports (10+): Cognitive load is a problem; EMs feel constantly "busy" with people management, processes, and rituals, leaving little time to get deeply involved in delivery and technical decisions.
  • EMs lack Technical depth: Because we historically hired/promoted with more emphasis on people management skills than on technical leadership, not all our leaders can act as technical decision-makers without training/experience that will take a long time to acquire.
  • Fuzzy responsibilities around delivery between Product and Engineering. We want EMs to be accountable for delivery, but often Product Managers own the backlog and prioritization sprint over sprint, and EMs are more of "executors".
This often leads to a lack of accountability: Maintaining the status quo, mostly "keeping the lights on".

Hypothesis - if EMs are more technical, that would be beneficial for delivery

  • EM should be able to make predictions and challenge estimations, and help the team think through unclear projects.
  • Being a technical leader helps with better decisions on architecture, scope, delivery, and quality.
  • A good understanding of technical implications helps to build a vision and roadmap for the team.
  • Technical leaders can better raise the bar on engineering craft.
  • Engineers respect managers with technical depth.
However, the impact of EMs is not necessarily measured by the amount of hands-on work, but rather the team performance as a whole - EMs, even when highly technical, should not become bottlenecks or focus more on tech work than delivery.

Actions for 2026

Concrete steps we are taking this year

Team composition

  • Max 10 people per EM. Ensure this happens for every case, merge/reshuffle teams in case there's an opportunity to reduce EM overload
  • Each EM, no matter if they have 1-2 teams, must focus on one domain.
  • For new teams, if hands-on is expected: ensure teams have 5-7 people, only one team per EM.
  • Ensure every team has a strong Senior+/Staff engineer who can partner with EM on strategy.

EMs as "mini-CTO" for their domains

  • EM is accountable for delivery. While Business priorities (the why/what) continue to be on the Product side, the EM should be the decision maker in delivery - deciding on the how/when.
  • EM must be able to make predictions and challenge estimations, and ensure there is a technical roadmap for their area/teams. This roadmap should be validated by the track director and (possibly) OCTO.
  • All new engineering hires (EMs, directors) must have a solid engineering background.

The role of Directors

Directors are accountable for the success of their EMs:

  • Ensuring teams are achieving outcomes in agreed timeframes, and removing inter-team blockers.
  • Following teams productivity and where they place in comparison to benchmark and reporting it to the directors group quarterly.
  • Ensure EMs invest in proactive performance management practices and talent growth, considering all cases where performance could be improved.
  • Obtain frequent skip-level feedback about EMs and provide continuous mentoring and clarity on expectations.
  • Ensure talent evaluation of EMs includes specific examples of technical quality of team deliverables.

Engineering Manager day-to-day

Daily routines, practices, and what success looks like

Routines and Practices

  • Owning delivery and making things happen, navigating uncertainty, removing inefficiencies and bottlenecks, challenging the team, making quality decisions.
  • Day-to-day involvement in technical choices - architecture decisions, technical debates.
  • Product mindset and strong partnership with PMs to shape solutions (not just executing); hands-on prototyping with the team to validate those solutions.
  • Platform thinking - Abstract common patterns and think about extensibility and reusable solutions. Build for multiple use cases, not one-off implementations.
  • Continuously improve productivity - leverage AI tools, fix what's broken, actually drive improvements, not just suggest.
Successful delivery is not possible without a healthy team. EMs also need to build and grow their teams, so they need to be on top of Coaching, Feedback, Interviewing, Performance management. This includes:
  • Being on top of important situations without micromanaging
  • Balancing the needs of different people and keeping management rituals simple and effective.
  • Strong communication, empathy, and change management - the ability to lead, inspire, and guide our engineers remains critical.
  • Raising the bar on personal productivity and questioning inefficient workflows.

What "good" looks like

Delivery: Owning outcomes and impact, delivering on promises
  • meeting deadlines - high ratio delivered vs planned work
  • discoverable planning and work artifacts - clean Jira
  • high throughput and efficiency
Technical vision:
  • able to judge about what good looks like - technically, process, business outcomes
  • clear technical roadmap, aligned with team and stakeholders
  • tech debt under control
Quality ship fast with "good enough" quality
  • low bug rates
  • no serious incidents
  • SLOs well defined and respected
Team health and maturity
  • eNPS and skip level feedback
  • engagement surveys (clarity, support, coaching)
  • team has independent engineers who can handle ambiguity
Continuous improvement
  • Have an explicit destination and ensure teams steer toward it
  • How faster / more efficient did the team(s) get over time
  • Reducing number of dependencies and unblocking others

Senior Engineering Manager

How the Senior EM role extends the EM role

Senior EM "extends" the EM

  • Works on a wider circle, with most projects spanning multiple teams across different parts of the organization.
  • Owns measurable business or product outcomes: responsible for at least one key metric.
  • Negotiates complex requirements across teams that they do not directly manage.
  • Senior EMs must be able to manage other managers whenever that is needed on their tracks.
  • Senior EMs have director responsibility at lower scale and should be prepared to be successors for directors.

What "good" looks like

  • Clearly reflect the ability to scale, articulate what works and teach it to others: make the whole system better.
  • Business contribution: quantifiable impact on users, revenue, SLAs, or customer satisfaction.
  • Innovation velocity: Experiments/Features/Platform Improvements launched.
  • Strategic influence: Strong influence in cross-org initiatives, mentoring, architecture or efficiency improvements
  • Examples of aligning multiple teams to a coherent vision or practice.
Promotion from EM → Senior EM focuses on scope of influence — developing other leaders, improving the system overall, maturity in decision making and high change management capabilities clearly demonstrated in relevant initiatives, with clear contribution to one or more business metrics. EMs become Senior EMs by proving they can make their teams high-performing and spreading those practices across the organization.