Exploring Engineering Manager & Director Team Size

Are your engineering managers and directors over-leveled or under-leveled? Or to put it another way, are your M5s actually M5s? 

Over-leveling and/or under-leveling your management layer can both carry costly cultural and compensation consequences over time. Today, let’s take a look at the average number of total reports with the orgs managed by engineering managers and directors.

Average Engineering Team Size

We looked at engineering managers and directors in Pave’s dataset. The results vary by job family, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the benchmarks vary greatly by stage—how many full-time employees (FTEs) the company has.

Engineering Manager Span of Control

These findings bring up some key takeaways about engineering managers and their span of control:

1. At early-stage companies (< ~50 FTEs), the Director and Senior Director levels and titles are perhaps thrown around a bit haphazardly given that on average, the average M5s and M6s only have ~4-10 people in their orgs. This can potentially lead to confusion about responsibilities as a company grows. Or, maybe this is all okay and expected given that org size is not always 100% correlated with company direction and influence, particularly at the early stage.

2. The delta between a M5 and a M6 gets progressively wider as companies mature. Under 500 FTEs, the delta is ~3-7 more total reports for a M6 versus a M5. But by the time companies get to over 1,000 FTEs, the delta increases to ~30+ more total reports for M6 versus a M5.

3. You could also look at the ratio of org sizes for M6 vs M3 as one way to understand if your org chart is perhaps too top heavy and/or you might require more (or fewer) senior leaders. Note that at the early stage, this M6-to-M3-ratio is ~2.5x but increases to ~7.0x by the time a company has 1,000+ FTEs.

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