Proposal to update manager titles and add a market aligned senior engineering manager role

Why is this change being made?

There have been some discussions [private slack channel, internal slack channel, internal meeting agenda, twitter] on management roles encapsulating a couple of concerns:

• Manager career progression
• Naming conventions for leadership roles

Manager Career Progression

As an Engineering Manager at GitLab, our progression is into a Senior Engineering Manager. We should be demonstrating the behaviour of a Senior Engineering Manager before seeing a promotion as is described in our handbook. Since this expectation would require a change in role, from managing individual contributors to managing manager, there's little opportunity to do this and could be considered a different role entirely. Not everyone who manages individual contributors will want to manage managers. There's an extra level of abstraction as well as a different focus in terms of communication and approach.

Naming Conventions for leadership roles.

Right now, GitLab uses "Engineering Manager" to describe someone who manages team members who are individual contributors. "Senior Engineering Manager" describes a role that managers Engineering Managers. A "Director" manages both Engineering Managers as well as Senior Engineering Managers. For a lot of organisations, "Senior Engineering Manager" is still managing individual contributors, maybe that's multiple teams, maybe that's a very experienced team (there could be a lot of ways to describe "senior") but this definition provides Engineering Managers a path to further their career while maintaining a close affinity with individual contributors.

Proposal

@nhxnguyen and I had a good discussion on making this proposal:

1. Rename current "Senior Engineering Manager" role to "Associate Director of Engineering"
2. Refactor "Senior Engineering Manager" to be a level (half job grade?) above "Engineering Manager"
3. Define what it would mean to be demonstrating "Senior Engineering Manager" performance
4. Determine if a new job grade is required and what that means in terms of benchmarks for GitLab
5. Determine if changes to span of control limits are required
6. Determine if board approval is required for a "director" title

Alternatives

• Add a second level of Engineering Manager role that is defined by managing more than one team
• Make "Senior Engineering Manager" encapsulate managing managers or not

Other thoughts

• From a career progression perspective, the titles we actually use aren't that important
• From a market alignment perspective, some titles aren't as clear "senior engineering manager" for example
• We could use something like "Staff Engineering Manager", or "Engineering Manager 2"
• People's current roles wouldn't change
• This MR is not complete, we're wanting to propose something to discuss

/cc @nhxnguyen @dsatcher

Author Checklist

• Provided a concise title for this Merge Request (MR)
• Added a description to this MR explaining the reasons for the proposed change, per say why, not just what
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• If the changes affect team members, or warrant an announcement in another way, please consider posting an update in #whats-happening-at-gitlab linking to this MR
  • If this is a change that directly impacts the majority of global team members, it should be a candidate for #company-fyi. Please work with internal communications and check the handbook for examples.

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