Your First Week as an Engineering Manager
What to do when you're suddenly responsible for people
You just became an engineering manager. Congratulations. You’re probably equal parts excited and terrified.
The first week sets the tone for everything that follows. Get it right and you build trust, establish credibility, and create momentum. Get it wrong and you spend months digging yourself out.
This playbook walks you through what to focus on in your first week.
Before Your First Day
If you have any lead time before you officially start, use it to prepare.
Talk to your manager. Understand their expectations for your first 30, 60, and 90 days. Ask about team dynamics, current priorities, and any immediate challenges. Find out what success looks like.
Review team documentation. Get access to whatever you can: team goals, project plans, architecture docs, recent retrospectives. You don’t need to master everything, but you need context.
Understand the org chart. Who reports to you? Who are your peers? Who are your stakeholders? Map it out.
Day One: Show Up and Listen
Your first day is not about making changes or proving yourself. It’s about showing up as a human being who is genuinely interested in the team.
Meet your team individually. Schedule 30-minute introductory one-on-ones with each person. Keep them casual. Your goal is to start building relationships, not to assess performance or solve problems.
Ask good questions:
What are you working on right now?
What do you enjoy most about your work?
What’s frustrating or slowing you down?
What should I know about the team?
What do you need from a manager?
Listen more than you talk. Take notes. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. If someone brings up a problem, acknowledge it and say you’ll follow up once you understand the situation better.
Don’t try to fix things yet. You don’t have enough context. Resist the urge to jump in with solutions or changes. Just listen and learn.
The First Few Days: Understand the Landscape
Once you’ve met everyone, start mapping out the bigger picture.
Understand current work. What projects are in flight? What’s blocked? What’s coming next? Where are the dependencies? You should be able to explain what your team is doing and why.
Identify stakeholders. Who depends on your team? Who does your team depend on? Schedule introductory meetings with key stakeholders to understand their expectations and concerns.
Attend team meetings. Observe how the team works together. Who speaks up? Who stays quiet? How are decisions made? What’s the energy like? Don’t change the format yet. Just watch.
Review recent retrospectives. If your team does retros, read the last few. Look for patterns in what’s working and what’s not. This gives you insight into recurring issues and team culture.
Talk to your peers. Other engineering managers or team leads can give you valuable context about how things work, where the landmines are, and what resources are available.
Building Trust
Trust is your most important asset as a manager. Here’s how to start building it in your first week.
Be present. Show up to meetings, be available for questions, and make time for conversations. If you’re remote, be visible in team channels.
Follow through. If you say you’ll do something, do it. If you can’t, explain why and reset expectations. Reliability matters more than anything else.
Be honest about what you don’t know. You’re new. No one expects you to have all the answers. Saying “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” is infinitely better than bullshitting or making something up.
Respect existing relationships. If you’re managing people who used to be your peers, acknowledge the transition. “I know this might feel weird. I want to make sure you still feel comfortable being direct with me.” Then prove it by how you respond when they are.
Don’t throw anyone under the bus. Even if you inherit a mess, resist the urge to blame your predecessor or criticize past decisions. It makes you look petty and erodes trust.
What Not to Do
Don’t make big changes. You don’t understand the system yet. Changes made without context usually backfire. Give yourself at least 30 days to observe before making structural changes.
Don’t try to prove yourself. You don’t need to demonstrate that you deserve the role by immediately solving problems or showing off your technical skills. Your job is different now. Focus on learning, not performing.
Don’t badmouth the previous manager. Even if the team brings up issues with how things were done before, don’t pile on. Acknowledge their concerns, say you want to understand the situation, and focus on the future.
Don’t overpromise. It’s tempting to reassure people that you’ll fix everything. Don’t. Be honest about what you can and can’t control, and make commitments only when you understand what’s involved.
Don’t disappear into meetings. New managers often get overwhelmed by calendar invites. Block time to actually talk to your team and process what you’re learning. If you’re never available, people will stop trying to reach you.
Setting Up Your Systems
Use your first week to establish the basic infrastructure you’ll need.
Schedule recurring one-on-ones. Get them on the calendar now. Weekly or biweekly, depending on team size. Consistency matters more than length.
Set up a team meeting cadence. If you don’t already have regular team meetings, set them up. Keep them focused: updates, blockers, decisions. Don’t let them become status reports.
Create a note-taking system. Whether it’s Notion, Google Docs, or a notebook, you need a place to track commitments, record observations, and capture feedback. Start building this habit immediately.
Clarify your availability. Let people know how to reach you and when. Are you available for Slack interruptions? Do they need to schedule time? Set expectations so people aren’t guessing.
By the End of Week One
You should have accomplished these things:
Met individually with everyone on your team
Mapped out current work and priorities
Identified key stakeholders and started building relationships
Understood immediate blockers or challenges
Set up recurring one-on-ones
Established basic availability and communication norms
Built a system for tracking commitments and notes
You should not have:
Made major organizational or process changes
Given performance feedback or performance reviews
Reorganized the team or changed roles
Made commitments you can’t keep
What Comes Next
Your first week is about observation and relationship building. Your first month is about understanding the system. Your first 90 days is when you start making changes based on what you’ve learned.
Don’t rush it. A solid foundation built in the first week makes everything else easier.
In week two, start going deeper on technical context, team dynamics, and stakeholder relationships. Begin forming hypotheses about what needs to change, but don’t act on them yet.
In your first month, schedule skip-level meetings if you manage managers, start giving feedback, and begin identifying quick wins that demonstrate progress without disrupting the system.
In your first 90 days, you’ll have earned enough trust and gathered enough context to make meaningful changes. That’s when you implement new processes, shift priorities, or address structural issues.
The Bottom Line
Your first week as an engineering manager is not about proving you deserve the job. It’s about showing up as a human, listening to your team, understanding the landscape, and building trust.
Do that well and everything else gets easier.