Balancing Code and Teams: How Microsoft Does Effective Engineering Management

Nick Cosentino says engineering management is about enabling people to do their best work, not just making technical contributions. He describes a path from startups to Microsoft, where his role in Substrate includes team leadership across deployment, routing, and DDOS protection, and where he tries to balance business needs with individual growth.

Reading notes

#

• He frames management as a people-first role that depends on situational leadership, transparency, and trust.
• He says every engineer needs a different approach, so he tries to understand each person’s feedback style, goals, challenges, and interests.
• He treats one-on-ones as meetings for the employee, with the employee’s agenda driving the conversation.
• He recommends using one-on-ones for career alignment, clear growth expectations, and discussion of rubrics and level expectations.
• He describes Microsoft’s culture as supporting diversity and inclusion, blameless post-incident reviews, growth mindset, safe-to-fail behavior, and Fix Hack Learn weeks.
• He highlights safe deployment practices, flighting, and a One Microsoft mindset as important parts of Substrate’s work.
• He sees AI as a tool that will replace some tasks and strengthen others, and he mentions Copilot for meeting summaries, code help, and incident debugging.
• He emphasizes flexibility, servant leadership, time blocking, learning from other leaders, and Radical Candor as practical supports for the role.