Stop leading in isolation: build a community of practice for engineering managers

Engineering managers juggle a lot: team dynamics, business alignment, and driving improvement — all at the same time. These challenges are too complex to tackle alone. A community of practice makes the difference.

A community of practice brings engineering leaders together to exchange ideas, share experiences, and grow — outside the reporting hierarchy.

Forget rigid processes or top-down directives. It’s about collaboration, experimentation, and creating a solid foundation for better leadership.

Here’s how to build one that’s truly effective.

Purpose — three pillars

Communities of practice stand on three pillars: empowering collaboration, fuelling growth, and leading with consistency.

• A platform for peer learning, where members share knowledge and grow together.
• A source of inspiration, offering success strategies and best practices.
• A safe space for asking questions and sharing tips.
• A framework for alignment on performance ratings, promotions, and hiring practices.
• A communication channel for topics like promotion planning and performance review updates.

Who it’s for

Every engineer has the potential to lead. Here, we help each other take the next step.

The community is for everyone in engineering leadership — managers, directors, and those preparing to step into leadership roles. Wherever you are on your journey, it’s a space to learn, share, and connect with peers.

Principles

Each community thrives on shared values:

• Respect — every voice matters. Ideas are shared openly, received with care.
• Experimentation — members are encouraged to try new approaches and share the learning.
• Growth — celebrate successes, learn from mistakes.

How it operates

Regular meetings

Bi-weekly meetings are the heart: structured sessions where members discuss topics, share insights, and ask questions.

• Collaborative agenda: participants suggest discussion points in advance.
• Facilitator role: ensures each meeting is impactful. Facilitators prep additional topics to guide conversations, especially in early stages when members need more direction.

What gets discussed — 6 categories

1. Ad-hoc topics — specific challenges, concerns, or gaps members bring in.

2. Learning and development — book summaries on engineering management, communication, collaboration, best practices.

3. Top-down communication

• Salary bands: explain methodologies when new salary ranges are available.
• Performance reviews: changes to the process, examples of effective goals.
• Promotions: consistency across managers when advancing team members.

4. Agility

• Experiment sharing: what teams tried, what worked, what didn’t (e.g., new retro formats).
• Metrics & KPIs: exchange useful metrics for daily EM tasks.
• Agile collaboration: work with the agile community on continuous-improvement experiments.

5. Recruitment and organisation

• Quarterly recruitment stats: funnel performance, successes, challenges.
• Team growth priorities: upcoming projects, hiring priorities, team shifts.

6. Best practices and incidents

• Incidents: key lessons to avoid repeating mistakes.
• Vertical slicing: creative ways to deliver customer value quickly.

Guest speakers from other departments (Talent, People, Community Management) round out perspectives.

Rules of engagement

Keep meetings efficient and outcome-driven:

1. Topic introduction — the facilitator shares the agenda and invites the submitter to explain.
2. Quick solutions — if the topic is simple or informational, resolve it during the meeting.
3. Complex issues — assess priority as a group. If worth investigating, form a tiger team (topic submitter + 2-3 others) who work on it offline and present at the next meeting.

Communication channels

• Shared calendar for bi-weekly meetings.
• Dedicated Slack (or Teams) channel for async discussion between sessions.
• Asana / Jira / Trello for tracking tiger-team work and follow-ups.
• Shared Notion / Confluence space for meeting notes, book summaries, and pattern library.

What “success” looks like

Six months in, you’ll notice:

• Managers reach for peers before reaching for you. The senior EM stops being a bottleneck.
• Consistency across the org. Same rubric for promotions, same salary-band conversations, same feedback style.
• Faster incident learning. Lessons from one team land in the next team’s playbook.
• New managers ramp faster. They inherit a community, not a title.

The tempo I recommend

• Month 1: define purpose, principles, cadence. Two or three “seed” topics ready.
• Month 2-3: facilitator prepares agendas actively. Members observe, learn the format.
• Month 4+: rotate facilitation. Members own the agenda. Facilitator becomes janitor.
• Month 6: first tiger-team output ships as a company-wide guideline.

Mission

The more we help raise first-time engineering managers in our territory, the faster our local companies match Berlin and London. A CoP is one of the highest-leverage moves in that direction — it turns a group of managers into a leadership operating system.