Be the salesman your team needs

The underrated part of an engineering manager's job

A few months ago, I was in a call with the new VP. She had just joined the company and was on her “listening tour”. She was meeting every manager, trying to figure out the org and understand what the teams were doing.

She looked at me and asked:

“Tell me about your team. What do they do, and why do we need them?”

Of course I knew what my team did. I knew how valuable their work was. But in that moment, with that question hanging in the air, I realized that I didn’t have a clear, compelling answer ready.

I fumbled through a few points. Named a project or two. Mentioned performance wins, uptime improvements. She nodded politely but I knew I hadn’t convinced her. I learned something valuable that day.

Always be ready to sell

You can be pulled in anytime to talk about the team and their work. You will only have a few minutes to do that. What will you focus on? How will you put months and years of context into a few sentences?

When I worked for a small company, this wasn’t something I ever needed. Everybody knew everybody and their work. We never really had to “sell”. But as companies grow and layers emerge, even people in your own org don’t know what your team does.

The other day, the Sr Director of SRE asked me “Remind me what your team does, again?” Are you kidding me? Because I manage the CI (Build) team that works with SRE day in and day out. I realized a thing about big companies.

Organizations have short term memory

Nobody remembers what you told them six months ago about your team. Especially not the senior leaders. They are looking at dozens of teams. They’re keeping a lot of info in their head. What’s out of sight is out of mind.

It bites you at the most inopportune time like promotions or performance rewards, when someone in the chain says, “Who dis?”

I recently worked for a leader who did this really well. He made sure the spotlight is on their team on a regular basis.

Here are the 4 things I learned from them about selling the team:

1. Create a Cool Team Name

The name is the brand of the team. Yet most people do not put too much thought into it. They let the architecture of the product define the name. API team, UI team, DB team, etc.

But having a cool and easy to remember name is very helpful to connect your team’s work. Make sure the name ties to what the team actually does and the vision.

Good team names:
✅ SPARQ (Service Performance and Release Quality) — cool acronym with a nicer long form
✅ Jenkins team — I know this is generic, but everyone knows what it means
✅ Authentication Server team — Gives you an idea of the service ownership

Not-so-good team names:
❌ DPCT — hard to remember acronym
❌ Metadata team — metadata of what? If you’re in a larger org, it’s better to be more specific
❌ Core team — same as above

If you suck at this, use ChatGPT. But you can’t suck at the next step.

2. Prepare Marketing Material For Your Team

Your team members may already know what they do and what their job is. But when you talk to people outside the team it’s different. The further away they’re away from your team the harder it gets.

So have it all written down in a way it makes sense to most people. Create a Team Charter - A simple one page summary of your team. This is what you will use to talk about to new leaders. Include:

• Mission statement in 1-2 sentence

• Key initiatives (tied to business impact)

• Metrics that show progress (latency, uptime, adoption, etc.)

• Dependencies: What systems or teams rely on us

• What happens if we don’t exist

Make it easy to skim. And obviously, keep it up-to-date. I also link to my Slack bio for others to view.

3. Send a Team Newsletter Regularly

This is the most important trick I’ve learned: a monthly or biweekly team newsletter.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just a short update you send to stakeholders, your management chain and other managers in your org. A few bullet points, maybe a screenshot or two of some metrics or charts. Include:

• What we worked on and it’s impact

• What we’re shipping next and why

It keeps your work in their peripheral vision. It earns reputation and trust. And it helps you build your own narrative.

4. Be Prepared to Talk About Anyone On Your Team

You should know the people on your team really well. To introduce my team to others in the company, I recently created some slides. I included the org chart as one slide and then a slide per team member with their info on it:

• Photo, name, title, tenure

• Short intro (in their own words)

• Skills & past projects

• Fun fact

Beyond that have a detailed skills matrix ready for your team so when a new project comes to you, you know who’s the right person for it. You should know everyone’s aspirations, career goals and how they’re doing performance-wise. Ideally it’s written down which you can pull up at a moment’s notice.

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Closing Thoughts

At some point, someone will ask you to talk about your team or indirectly justify their work. It may come as a casual question. Or a hard conversation.

Don’t wait for that moment to start preparing. Stay ready. In fact, be proactive and avoid being in that situation at all. Because in a large org, visibility isn’t automatic.

You’ll have to find ways to highlight the work of the team. You’ll need to make sure people remember you and your team. So that come promotion or performance cycle or a reorg, you don’t struggle to do it.

If you don’t sell your team, no one else will.

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