As an Engineering Manager, you're no longer just the architect of systems — you're also the architect of teams and processes. But your role in system design is still critical. The challenge lies in striking a balance: enabling high-quality technical decisions without being the one making every call.

This post explores how EMs can approach system design strategically — influencing architecture, fostering ownership, and building systems that scale both technically and organizationally.

Why System Design Still Matters for EMs

While you may not be writing every line of code or diagramming every service interaction, your decisions set the tone for:

• Technical direction: You influence how systems evolve over time.
• Team autonomy: You shape the decision-making boundaries for your engineers.
• Scalability: You ensure systems are designed with future growth in mind.
• Maintainability: You create conditions for long-term code and system health.

A Strategic Approach to System Design

1. Create clarity, not answers

Your job is to ask the right questions, not always provide the right answers. Help your team explore trade-offs:

• What are the scaling risks here?
• How would this design impact on-call load?
• Are we over-engineering for a problem we don’t yet have?

Use design reviews and architectural RFCs to promote thoughtfulness and clarity.

2. Enable decentralized decision-making

Empower engineers to lead design efforts. As an EM, define the guardrails, not the paths:

• Establish clear technical principles.
• Create templates for system design documents.
• Promote shared ownership of architecture.

Let your team lead, and step in to guide when needed — not to override.

3. Balance now vs. later

It’s tempting to optimize for future scale, but premature optimization leads to complexity debt. Help your team prioritize:

• What needs to be right today?
• What’s easy to evolve later?

Technical strategy isn’t about predicting the future — it’s about building for adaptability.

4. Drive alignment across teams

As systems grow, boundaries blur. Cross-team dependencies become the norm. Your role is to:

• Facilitate architectural alignment across teams.
• Encourage reuse and shared infrastructure.
• Push for documentation and communication around system interfaces.

Think like a city planner: your job is to keep traffic flowing and avoid bottlenecks.

5. Invest in observability and operations

Great systems aren’t just scalable — they’re observable, debuggable, and operable.

• Encourage teams to design with failure in mind.
• Push for solid logging, tracing, and alerting practices.
• Make operational excellence a part of your culture.

A system that’s hard to operate is a system that won’t scale with people.

Red Flags to Watch

• Single points of knowledge: If only one person understands a system, it’s not truly maintainable.
• Architecture by committee: Endless debates kill momentum. Decisions should be informed, not delayed.
• Over-abstraction: Layers of indirection don’t solve real problems — they often create new ones.

Final Thoughts

System design at the EM level is less about technical control and more about strategic enablement. You’re not the final approver — you’re the force multiplier. By fostering a culture of thoughtful design, scalable thinking, and shared ownership, you can build systems — and teams — that thrive over the long haul.

---

What’s your approach to system design as an EM? I’d love to hear your strategies, wins, or lessons learned.