How to manage departure of engineering manager?

The EM with whom I directly work with, for my product, is leaving the company. This came as quite a shock since they were in the company for a long time and I am disappointed because I was looking forward to leveraging their inside knowledge and familiarity with the systems to drive a successful partnership.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? If you were me, how would you approach this and what next steps would you take?

I am meeting with them before they leave. Any ideas for what to cover during our discussion, apart from knowledge transfer and handovers, etc. ?

  1. Understand the reasons well.
  2. Ensure that hand-off is done well, if they were long with the company there is a good chance they know more than what is documented, that knowledge might be lost. It is sometimes worth setting a ‘consulting’ contract for this.
  3. Ask about the team/make sure there is a replacement underway.
  4. Ask them about product gaps, they might be able to provide you with some info on tech debt, important infra projects etc.

Overall this is absolutely normal, teams should always be ready for people leaving.

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I would recommend taking them out for drinks and trying to get the “real scoop”. That would give you really good insights on issues to avoid or solve and often people are not comfortable sharing at the office.

Treat this as a good opportunity to “reset”. With a new guard, it would be a missed opportunity not to step back and really reimagine or reframe the product, the purpose, and the journey.

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Thank you! This is very useful advice. I plan to mostly use our time together to clearly understand existing tech debt, challenges, and their ideas for what seems achievable for our product in the short term.

I would recommend taking them out for drinks and trying to get the “real scoop”. That would give you really good insights on issues to avoid or solve and often people are not comfortable sharing at the office.

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