The engineering manager role is splitting in two

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Key takeaways:

• The engineering manager (EM) role is splitting into two very different futures. One stays close to the code. The other expands outward across multiple teams.
• Most companies haven’t decided which model they’re building: the flattening is happening through layoffs and reorgs, not deliberate design.
• The preparation for each path is completely different.

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AI is reshaping the traditional team structure that engineering managers are used to. Here’s what the role is turning into, and how to figure out which version of it you’re working toward.

Imagine the team you joined five years ago. A product manager, an engineering manager, a designer, and six or seven engineers. Weekly planning meetings, a backlog to groom, and a sprint to run. That was the standard shape of a team for most of the last decade.

Now look at the team shapes starting to emerge in 2026. In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta’s new applied AI engineering team would run with a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio. That’s far beyond the ranges most research supports.

The shrinking engineering team

Gallup’s analysis of over 200,000 manager-led teams found that two-thirds of managers oversee fewer than 10 people. A Happily.ai review of data from 200+ companies found that managers with 15 or more direct reports score 20% lower on team engagement than those with seven or fewer.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has publicly mandated a 15% increase in the ratio of individual contributors (IC) to managers across the company. Gartner predicts that, through 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to flatten their structures and eliminate more than half of their current middle management positions.

At the same time, the product manager role is changing. Recent AI product management workflows now routinely involve generating functional prototypes with tools like Claude Code and Lovable, rather than waiting weeks for engineering bandwidth. A product manager can demo a clickable product on Monday and hand the engineers a working reference, instead of a Figma file.

Put these changes together and the traditional team loses a lot of its glue. A product manager who prototypes new ideas and gets customer feedback, and one or two engineers who build the guardrails and maintain the system, can now cover what a traditional team used to do.

This leads to an uncomfortable question for anyone on the path to engineering manager (EM): if teams become that small, what is the EM actually doing?

Two different answers are emerging which point to very different futures for the role and have contrasting implications for your career.

The first future: the tech lead manager comes back

The first answer is that small teams don’t need a dedicated people manager at all. What they need is a senior engineer who sets technical direction, still writes code, and handles the lighter managerial load of a three- or four-person team: one-to-ones, career conversations, and project coordination. This is the tech lead manager (TLM).

The TLM has historically had a mixed reputation. Software engineering leader Will Larson has argued that TLM roles tend to be unstable because they force one person to split attention between two demanding jobs, with one side always losing. That argument was based on traditional team sizes, where both jobs were full-time. If the team shrinks to three engineers, the managerial load shrinks with it, and the split becomes more manageable.

For engineers, this version of the future is relatively good news. When small teams can be more productive than bigger ones, companies will naturally start leaning toward this model. In this world, the path to management relies on technical work. You go from senior engineer to TLM, and you’re still writing code every day.

If this is the future you want, there are a few things worth doing now:

• Take on informal leadership of a small workstream on your current team, even if your title doesn’t change. Getting a feel for one-to-ones, planning, and unblocking others is the core of the TLM role.
• Build the technical judgment that lets you review AI-generated code effectively. A recent Faros AI report found that pull request review time increased 91% on high AI adoption teams, making review skill the scarce resource.
• Get comfortable with ambiguity. TLMs carry more scope and technical responsibility than engineers, so the job rewards engineers who can hold both sides at once.

The tradeoff to understand going in is that the TLM ceiling is different from the traditional EM ceiling. Running a team of three as a TLM is not the same career trajectory as running a team of ten as an EM, and the route to director or VP of engineering from TLM is less well-defined because the career paths above TLM haven’t been standardized in the same way.

The second future: the EM scope expands across many teams

The other potential future is that the EM role widens. Instead of managing one team of seven, the EM of 2030 might manage many smaller teams across multiple product areas. The ratio starts to look more like Meta’s 50-to-1 than the 7-to-1 that researchers have long considered optimal.

In this version of the role, the work becomes almost entirely non-technical. You’re running one-to-ones with people working on completely different problems, handling performance management, coordinating between teams, and reporting upward. Your technical depth on any single team’s work will be shallow.

The traditional way engineers became EMs, though, was by first running one team. How does an engineer whose sole focus used to be technical expertise and delivery transition to becoming a pure people manager of five teams?

Three possibilities are emerging from how companies are restructuring:

• The multi-team EM role gets filled less by engineers and more by professional managers who can have adjacent backgrounds in product, program management, or even operations.
• Companies build selective learning and development programs to grow engineers into multi-team managers.
• Companies create EM levels that cater to the number of teams they’re looking after. Associate EM looks after one or two teams. EM looks after three-to-five teams. Senior EM looks after even more teams or manages associate EMs and EMs.

If this is the future you want, the preparation looks very different from the TLM path. Instead of deepening your technical judgment, you’ll need to practice the skills that transfer across domains:

• Run one-to-ones with someone whose technical work you don’t deeply understand. That skill is the core of the multi-team EM role.
• Get visible to your skip-level manager by leading internal initiatives successfully. Leadership programs pick people who have a track record of excellent execution.

Which future is your company building?

Most engineers who want to become managers don’t know which of these futures their own company is moving toward. Part of the reason is that most companies haven’t decided. The flattening is happening through cost-driven layoffs and reorganizations, which leaves engineers navigating a career path that may not exist by the time they reach it.

A few questions can tell you a lot:

• What’s the current team-to-manager ratio in your company, and has it changed in the last 12 months? A ratio that’s been rising past 10-to-1 suggests your company might be heading toward the multi-team EM model.
• What did the last person promoted into EM at your company look like? Were they a strong IC on a single team, or someone with strong people skills?
• Does your engineering leadership talk about “tech leads” or “player-coaches?” These often signal a preference toward the TLM direction.

The answers will probably not point clearly in one direction, but they can signal what to prepare for.

The engineering manager role of the future

The traditional EM role was built for a team shape that may not survive the decade. What replaces it depends on whether companies conclude that small, AI-augmented teams need embedded technical leaders or interchangeable managers at scale. Both models are being tried right now.

For engineers hoping to grow following the management path, I recommend you stop thinking of “becoming an EM” as a single career destination. We’re currently witnessing how companies navigate this dilemma of the future shape of the role. One stays closer to the code, the other moves away from it entirely.

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