SumUp Engineering Progression

Framework
Status May 23, 2023 : adopted by several tribes already; ready for general adoption from the
perspective of eng leadership and People Team. For Berlin: pending WoCo approval

At SumUp, we aim to be among the top tech companies in the world to minimize our impact for
small merchants. To evolve our engineering culture globally, a shared understanding of
excellence is important. That is why this framework aims to establish a shared understanding of
engineering excellence at SumUp and to define engineering career paths that are fair and
applicable across tribes and locations. While the framework is applicable to all engineering
roles at SumUp, Tribes and specific functions are invited to extend the framework for their
specific needs.

Guiding Principles
The SumUp Engineering Progression Framework is 100% compatible with SumUp Seeds &
Steps. There are a few guiding pillars for engineering progression at SumUp:

● Delivery & impact towards your tribe's mission (and thus to SumUps mission) is the
most important criterion.
● We believe impact results from the combination of great expertise, leadership and team
skills and virtues.
● We strongly believe in the 24 Capabilities as enabling guidelines for high-impact
engineering teams.
● Compensation depends on the country you are in. While we may apply different
compensation schemes in different locations, we want to align on the same expectation
for titles.
● This framework is not a checklist. It is a compass, not a GPS.
● Agreements and career development steps discussed between team members and
their managers will always outweigh this framework. Impact, scope, ownership,
customer centricity and independence are highly individual concepts and depend a lot
on the context.
● The steps are cumulative and experience builds up over time. That means that skills
and behaviors within a certain step are expected also in later steps. As an example: We
expect all engineers to proactively test their work, despite this being a Junior Engineer
behavior.
 ● The introduction of this framework is a guideline (center of gravity) for a more aligned
career flow across tribes. Its adoption is up to the tribes and should be applied for hires
and promotions such that adoption happens over time. We will not demote anybody
just because the framework “does not fit”. Please also see the FAQ at the end of this
document.

Developing Progressing Expert & Leadership Executive

Step Step (1) Step (3) Step (5)

L2 L3 L4 L5 L6 L7 L8 L9

Software Software Senior Senior Senior

Engineer I Engineer II Software Software Software
Engineer I Engineer II Engineer III

Staff Senior Principal Distinguished

Engineer Staff Engineer Engineer
Engineer

EM EM Senior Director of VP of
I II EM (EM Engineering Engineering
III)

Delivery & Impact

“What have I accomplished and on what scale?”

Delivery & impact is the main driver for progression at SumUp. Impact measures the
contribution and influence to the success as a business with regards to SumUp’s mission and
goals. A high, continuous delivery and impact is accomplished by balancing pace, quality and
team workload. A north-star for impact is to listen extremely well to your customers since the
customers are always right.

In many cases, DevOps practices help to achieve a constant flow of value that leads to positive
impact by continuously delivering product improvements over time.

The area of the business you work in may mean you can have impact in different ways. For
instance, through building great software products, growing our merchant base, helping with
efficiency or cost reduction, meeting regulatory requirements, or more. As a thought
experiment to get a feeling for your own personal impact, put yourself in the shoes of a small
merchant and consider how she would evaluate the value of your work. As another thought
experiment, consider how many merchants were positively impacted by the code that you
wrote (or influenced).

As your experience increases, your impact and independence usually grows as well. Projects
and responsibilities become bigger, you share more knowledge than you receive, start to coach
others, tools you use become more powerful, you influence more and more services and
components and have a bigger influence on the tribe and company. Experiences usually
means that your skills and behaviors become more versatile and effective for different
situations and contexts.

While Engineers have their primary impact through building great software, one may also have
secondary impact in other, indirect ways, like
● improving engineering practices,
● writing valuable documentation
● contribution to the engineering culture (e.g. hiring, reviews, mentoring,
● contributions to employer branding

Expertise

“How well do I know my craft?”

Technical expertise describes the hands-on, technical knowledge that you possess and how
you apply it to improve software. A high degree of technical skills results in high efficiency and
high quality (= less rework necessary). For example, a deep understanding of the programming
language at hand as well as a deep understanding of the employed tools and runtime
environment allows to apply changes to the software product effectively. Conversely, if these
hard-skills were missing, you would constantly run into compiler errors, need to research how
to use the tools and debug your code in the production environment.

Technical expertise can be separated into functional quality (solution does what it should do)
and non-functional qualities (scalable, reliable, low-latency, extensible, architecture, testability,
observability, etc.). Technical expertise also includes the ability to design and critique designs.
Your technical skills will gradually scale and improve with experience as you see more systems
and teams from the inside.
SumUp follows the ideal of a T-shaped Engineer that describes Engineers to be more
generalists than specialists. We have seen in the past that generalists are usually far more
successful at solving larger problems than engineers who have an extremely deep but narrow
understanding of a particular technology.

Excellence here looks like:

● Your code and technical contribution is regarded as high quality by your peers and
those more senior according to the framework.
● You resolve ambiguity and efficiently design systems to solve business problems, both
at the technical and product level.
● Your systems are designed with the appropriate level of complexity for the problem at
hand. Your software is as simple as possible, but no simpler.
● Your work is resilient (maintainable, transferable), cost effective, well tested and scales
to meet customer growth expectations.

Leadership & Team Skills

“How do I interact with others?”

Leadership & team skills are a broad range of behaviors around communication, collaboration,
project management and thought leadership. Building great products requires a great team to
work together efficiently and effectively.

Many of these skills and traits are described in the book Accelerate that every Engineer at
SumUp is expected to have internalized. Through your behavior you set an example to those
around you. By modeling great behaviors you lead by example, and by being self-aware you
know when you are setting a great example. Your behaviors show that you’re growing good
habits, and cultivating qualities that make an excellent engineer, rather than unintentionally
doing the “right thing” by luck.

Leadership & team skills also include: Will to improve, clear communication, mentorship &
coaching, seek feedback, build community, coherence, trust others’ expertise, create
psychological safety, transparency, respect what matters to others and contagious enjoyment
Virtues

“How can I make SumUp better?”

Virtues describe a mindset that helps SumUp grow as a whole. Virtues apply to all SumUppers
on all levels and include behaviors such as:
● Decisively Pragmatic
● Intrinsic Motivation
● Develop a Growth Mindset
● Be People Positive
● Mental Agility: Change is my friend
● Diverse & inclusive
● Act as an anti-toxin

Since virtues apply to every SumUpper on every level, they are not described in-depth for each
level but expected to be present (or improved over time).

Agile and 24 Capabilities

A key driver for impact is the development of an agile mindset that informs behavior but also
hard-skills. Derived from SumUps organizational vision to become a living organism of small,
cross-functional, self-organized and autonomous teams, managers and senior engineers are
expected to foster the collective agile mindset that makes up our culture. Experienced
SumUppers are well-versed with the 4 Agile values and their principles and are actively working
on fostering the 24 Capabilities and in their squad and tribe.

Usage of the progression framework

The purpose of this framework is to guide conversations around performance and progression
between managers and engineers. These conversations may be informal, but can also take
place as Talent Evolution Discussions (TED) as well as Talk-Align-Develop (TAD) conversations.

Junior Engineer (Intern)

Scope: ✅ Task
Summary: A new engineer, with high potential, picking up the fundamentals they need to be
successful in their squad.
 Junior Engineers are at the start of their software engineering career. They’re working on
well-defined tasks and are supported by the team when stuck. They’re expected to ask lots of
questions! As someone progresses toward Engineer I they should start to gain confidence to
pick up larger or less well-defined tasks with less required support.

Impact

Delivers well-defined tasks, in collaboration with more experienced engineers.

Expertise Leadership & Team Skills

Writes well tested code and documentation that Proactively learns from the work of others.
meets functional requirements.
Proactively communicates to their team what
Demonstrates understanding of common they are working on, why, how it's going and
Software Engineering concepts. what help they need.

Works towards proficiently using their tooling and Asks questions to understand how to write
systems, including their development effective code, and prioritizes their own learning
environment, source control, and internal SumUp to better serve their squad.
tooling.

Proactively improves the test coverage and

documentation of the code they touch.

Engineer (I, II)

Scope: 🎨
Project or feature, impact on Squad
Summary: A strong individual contributor. Responsible for the entire lifecycle of a project or
feature

Engineer (I and II) defines an individual contributor at SumUp, able to take on any technical
problem related to their discipline or domain confidently, and can clearly articulate how they’re
working with others to help their team reach its goals. While we don’t expect any engineer to
work alone, engineers in the Developing Step are capable of working highly independently, and
can lead on the design and implementation of a feature or project. An Engineer (I and II) not
only delivers their own work, but also demonstrates the ability to bring up others around them,
for example through activities such as onboarding engineers into their team, or mentoring less
experienced engineers working with them. They are engaged in the challenges, opportunities
and risks faced by their squad, tribe and discipline – taking part in the initiatives where they’re
best placed to help. Our expectation is that all SumUp engineers are capable of reaching
 Engineer (I and II) within an appropriate timescale, but they may not wish to take on additional
responsibilities beyond this step, and that’s OK.

Every Engineer at SumUp must have read the book Accelerate to understand the 24
Capabilities.

Impact

Delivers tasks and designs effective solutions to product features or small scope engineering
challenges in the context of the squad.

Makes steps towards independently owning the development of a feature, or problem space,
including the ability to identify, define, and scope problems.

Breaks down medium sized engineering problems in collaboration with more senior engineers.

Demonstrates ownership of problems within the squad, and repeatedly achieving successful
outcomes for those problems.

Relied upon to be a trusted problem solver, capable of leading the resolution of critical bugs or
incidents related to their work or area of expertise.

Expertise Leadership & Team Skills

Writes clear, well structured code that reflects Gives direct feedback to others in their team,
coding guidelines and conventions, and can be including giving useful and actionable feedback
easily understood by others. Writes code that is after reviewing their work. Proactively asks for
regarded by their peers as high quality. feedback from others and accepts the feedback
graciously.
Improves areas of the code they work on. Leaves
things better than they found them. (boy scout Proactively communicates progress to their team,
rule) attempts to unblock themselves, but seeks timely
guidance where needed.
Proactively tests their work appropriately.
Collaborates confidently with other domains (e.g.
Proactively documents existing and new features Design, Legal, Data, Risk) to help them
or projects. understand the work the engineer’s team is
doing.
Provides clear and actionable technical feedback
on pull requests. Regularly mentors other engineers, particularly
those less experienced than themselves.
References our engineering principles when Onboards new engineers into their team.
giving feedback on others' code.

Takes responsibility for the quality of their work.

Owns fixing defects. Helps grow the engineering function by
participating in the hiring process, giving effective
Proficient in their engineering domain. feedback in scorecards and during debriefs.

Provides context and clarity to their work through Effectively escalates problems that have a wider
effective in-code comments / documentation / scope than their team or work, supporting to
proposals / runbooks / observability so that bring it to a successful conclusion.
others can easily understand what’s being built,
why it was done that way, so it can be built upon. Can be relied on to consistently deliver work, able
to solve project or feature-level problems
Balances short term needs against long term themselves but escalates and seeks help quickly
stability and code quality. when unexpected challenges or blockers emerge.

Takes ownership of the DevOps steps of their Effectively works with and promotes good
services, building pipelines, deploying, improving practices in non-functional areas, such as
monitoring and constantly making their services accessibility, performance, and security to help
more secure. other engineers deepen their knowledge.

Identifies and addresses existing gaps in the Copes well with ambiguity and uncertainty, thinks
observability and monitoring of systems and in tradeoffs and documents their deliberately
independently manages escalations for their taken decisions.
squad, collective and discipline for their area.
Enthusiastically engages with squad, chapter or
tribe-level initiatives where they’re best placed to
help, bringing about positive change from their
involvement.

Onboarding or mentoring of new joining

engineers in their team well.

Senior Engineer (I, II, III)

Scope: 👥Tribe or Domain
Summary: A strong and experienced individual contributor, leading in a team or domain area

The scope and impact of a Senior Engineer is typically felt at the team or domain level, with
their influence beginning to spread wider across the business. A Senior Engineer can be
trusted to work on a large and complex feature or change that affects millions of users. A
Senior Engineer should have clearly visible impact on a team (or teams) achieving their goals,
documented in their performance reviews (TAD, TED and IDP).
Culturally, Senior Engineers can explain the 4 agile values and their 12 agile principles. Also, they
contribute to improve their tribe towards the 24 Capabilities.

As Engineers, the Impact for Senior Engineers can be made in various ways; we acknowledge
that there are different archetypes of Senior Engineers. Depending on the individual situation,
someone may skew more heavily towards certain behaviors and technical skills than others. A
useful but imperfect lens is that of a continuum from Tech Lead to Domain Expert.

● Someone with Tech Lead skills: excels at leading engineering in their team, effectively
working with other disciplines such as product and design, or stakeholders such as
finance and data analysts. While they may be involved in running rituals, their impact is
felt more around the engineering culture they foster through their work. Tech Leads
cultivate the design of performant systems that scale and meet customer needs,
encouraging and supporting their team to build software that is high quality and tested
sufficiently. Some engineers may wear the Tech Lead hat before they reach Senior Eng,
but not yet be meeting the Step expectations in other ways; Senior Engineer and Tech
Lead are not synonyms.
● The other end of the scale has the Domain Expert, who is a tribe or company-wide
subject matter expert in one or more areas of our platform, whether that’s a set of
complex services or problems, such as Mastercard, or a particular technology such as
Kafka. The Domain Expert drives technology forward for SumUp, and is typically the
person leading systems design in that area, sharing proposals to level up others with
their work.
● In between will be people who are technically competent, excellent team members and
highly productive but none of whom are a specific 'expert' in a particular thing or want
to be a Tech Lead.
● Or the imperfection of this lens shows through. A developer may simply have both deep
domain knowledge and powerful Tech Lead skills. Or excel in an unusual/atypical
endeavor (like maybe W3C committee membership or a cross-functional technical
coordinator).

The transition to Senior is a challenging step up, and with it comes new responsibilities and
expectations. Not every engineer will be capable of, or want to become a Senior Engineer, but
SumUp will always need engineers in this step and there will be opportunities to progress to
this point should someone be willing and able.

The Senior Engineer role is designed to stay in for a very long time, theoretically forever. There
will always be room for growth within this step, and the career steps and salary bands are
designed to support this growth.
 Impact

Contributes to their team or domain meeting goals through successfully driving and consistently
delivering on projects with ambiguous requirements, involving multiple squads (potentially even
tribes), and critical business impact.

Can be trusted with the highest priority business problems or fires, can quickly resolve them and help
the business understand how to avoid them in future.

Proactively helps other engineers grow through pair programming, sponsoring, mentoring and
providing constructive, candid feedback.

Proactively gives technical and strategic feedback on projects relevant to their expertise that leads to
better outcomes.

Impacts the trajectory of the company both through working on the most impactful problems and
being able to bring change. Evangelists of sensible commonalities and good collaboration models
(Team Topologies) between tribes, e.g. Centers of Gravity.

Links technical contribution back to business impact for their team or area, and helps others to buy
into this.

Expertise Leadership & Team Skills

Consistently leads their squad to good Can clearly and confidently articulate risk and
outcomes from a technical perspective, alternatives of technical problems to non technical
ensuring appropriate engineering decisions stakeholders (e.g legal, compliance)
are made to factor in technical debt, systems
design, stability/reliability, Communicates effectively when representing SumUp
monitoring/observability and business needs. to external stakeholders (e.g auditors, regulators,
third-parties, or industry groups) when appropriate.
T-Shaped Engineer that is not bound to a
“preferred” language or framework. Senior Represents SumUp externally, helping to attract new
Engineers put the right tool that is best for talent by communicating in public forums (e.g. public
the company first. speaking, blogging, participating in technical
communities, etc).
Regularly recognized in their team and
collective for highly impactful technical Promotes a knowledge sharing culture by organizing
contributions of the highest quality. knowledge sharing sessions, hackathons, seisō
sessions on the tribe level.
Proposes changes to technical scope to
handle changing business priorities or Actively and regularly offers well considered
urgency. Leads the refactoring of complex contributions to the roadmap of their team or
systems or problems when it is warranted. business area. Fosters effective collaboration
between product, engineering and design.
Deliberately makes pragmatic trade-offs Demonstrates customer focus. Offers valuable
between perfection and technical debt which contributions to quarterly planning rituals, and works
aligns with our priorities as a business, with the PM or team lead on setting the vision for a
including how to repay debt, and squad.
communicates those clearly and explicitly.
Ensures their squad is focusing on work that will
Operates the services for their teams, drive forward quarterly goals or business objectives,
prioritizing tasks which are essential for the whilst reducing the operational impact for engineers.
services to run according to SLOs agreed
with the Product, drives the go-lives for their Repeatedly consulted for advice by engineers from
squads and when needed drives efficient different squads.
Post Mortems.
Proactively stays up to date with technology trends
Creates strategies on how to monitor and in their area, and uses this knowledge to contribute
constantly improve the visibility of their thoughts on their tribe’s strategy.
team's services.
Works to enable groups of others to improve coding
Competently works on complex and standards and awareness of best practices around
unknown problems under pressure (e.g. non-functional requirements (e.g. performance,
debugging complex production issues at testability, scale, security)
speed, or leading the resolution of critical or
major incidents). Tackles problems before they can do harm, knowing
which levers to pull to make change happen.
Speaks or writes for internal and external
consumption. Demonstrates their technical skills outside of code,
and leads the design process for complex technical
problems in their team or tribe. Contributes to
architecture RFCs and discussions, takes part in
initiatives to improve the practices of the engineering
discipline.

Leads by example to proactively foster an inclusive,

diverse, and positive engineering culture across the
business.

Staff Engineer and Senior Staff Engineer

Scope: 🍱 Cross-Tribe or Discipline
Summary: A highly impactful individual contributor, taking on technical leadership in a large
domain or tribe.
 Staff Engineers are instrumental in helping SumUp achieve our collective and business goals.
They focus on high-impact, high-value work on our most significant and challenging problems
by breaking down large long-term projects and mobilizing teams to deliver them.

They embody and promote a healthy and productive engineering culture. They do so by role
modelling behaviour that supports our values, knowledge sharing and outstanding execution in
line with 24 Capabilities and our organizational beliefs as laid out, among others, in our wildly
transformational fundamentals.

Staff engineers are technical authorities in their area of expertise and consulted in complex
decision-making situations for advice, opinion or ideas.

They proactively and successfully drive cross-team initiatives and lead and guide others through
pragmatic technical choices and trade-offs. They actively help lead engineering technology
strategy for their tribe or discipline, and continuously drive good architecture (eg. via RFCs) and
cross-tribal architectural integrity.

The default way to becoming Staff is to successfully drive and complete high-impact, complex
initiatives ("staff-level projects"). This means that opportunities to become Staff are limited at
any given time — new ones will continue to show up, though.

Impact

Contributes to achieving company and collective goals and directly increases the company’s value
over time. Sought out by others for contribution on our most pressing and highest priority business
challenges because they’re known to be effective. Leads large, strategic, complex engineering
projects - often crossing collective boundaries. Drives architecture and systems design across
multiple squads in a collective.

Regularly and positively influences the direction of systems design across the company. Proactively
sponsors, mentors, and helps to level-up less senior engineers. Comfortably leads the resolution of
any engineering problem related to their discipline, whether they have experienced it or not.

Expertise Leadership & Team Skills

Leads architectural system designs on the Understands importance of product-market fit and
most complex systems. works closely with product leadership to ensure
we're making the right decisions across one or more
Demonstrates a high customer focus for the squads.
areas of the business they are working with.
Proactively identifies problems that challenge our
Has a proven track record of implementing scale or business direction. Effectively
significant improvements in quality, reliability, communicates these and supports changes to adapt
performance, stability and scalability to the to these challenges.
systems they work on.
 Promotes a Westrum generative culture by
Fosters a culture of quality within their team. organizing knowledge sharing sessions, Hackathons,
Proactively champions measures to test MeetUps and other company level meetings.
work, and gets buy-in from stakeholders no
when this is not appreciated. Is widely considered an expert in one or more areas
by their peers, and collective and company
Can understand the context of multiple leadership.
different work streams, and offer effective
technical advice and support for those Steps up to lead when required, even if not explicitly
workstreams while maintaining excellent asked of them. Regularly challenges their team or
velocity. area to have a greater sense of urgency for company
priorities.

Remains calm during incidents or critical company

emergencies. Can influence and lead others to bring
structure and clarity rather than chaos.

Able to proactively propose strategy for engineering

within their tribe/discipline, and knows how to
effectively get buy-in and move this forward.

Able to effectively delegate to load balance their

work where necessary, while also using this as an
opportunity to bring up others.

Principal Engineer
Scope: 🏦 Company
Summary: An engineering leader having impact across a broad area of the company, wider
than a single tribe.

A Principal Engineer is leading technical initiatives which directly address SumUp’s most
important needs, beyond a single tribe or discipline. To do this, they’ll be setting high level
vision and strategy, and directly use their engineering knowledge and abilities to create
solutions to our most challenging problems.

Agile and 24 Capabilities mastermind.

They’re respected by both the wider SumUp engineering community, and the industry at large.
 To move to and progress through Step 6 they’ll be on an individual journey and their
progression and goals will be very bespoke. These will be agreed with their line manager and
other senior leaders around the business. There will be a difference between an engineer being
a general Principal Engineer, and one who is doing a very specific job. Progression to Principal
is rare, and depends on having a specialism or unique skill that is critical to the company.

Impact

Able to significantly and directly impact both SumUp’s success, and the success of Engineering as a
discipline across the company (spanning more than individual sub-disciplines such as purely web,
mobile, backend). Impact is lasting - their work not only sets the business up well for the future, but
also leaves a legacy to ensure that large problems only have to be revisited at an appropriate
cadence.

The scale of their impact is felt business-wide, and they do this by acting as a multiplier (e.g.
creating systems, tools, or introducing policies or patterns) to raise productivity, performance, and
control. Consistently puts in place measures to ensure strong engineering leadership in the future.
Through their involvement, SumUp’s architecture is known to be robust and effective, with
confidence in its scalability and strategy for the future.

Expertise Leadership & Team Skills

Confident in setting out overall architectural Thinks in terms of a 3-5 year future time horizon,
vision on a company-wide scale, which has helping others to see what’s down the road, and
the ability to grow and flex effectively in line what the implications are for now.
with business plans.
Supports hiring our most senior engineering people.
Able to identify root causes and initiate
changes to the processes or technologies Cares about, and is involved in the wider business
that underpin SumUp’s engineering strategy; doesn’t just have a pure engineering focus.
organization. Ideally the person would also be able to contribute
directly to the business strategy.
Confident with huge scale complexity, and
someone we would send to our very gnarliest Able to provide actionable direction to teams of
problems. multiple stakeholders even in the most challenging of
situations.
Capable of temporarily bolstering a team or
business area to pair or write code on Effective at creating and getting buy-in for a
problems that are particularly complex, multi-year technology strategy across the company,
difficult, high impact, or novel. from Board level to individual engineers.

Defines and sets our principles and patterns, Able to make and communicate difficult decisions
including extending these to cover previously when necessary.
unknown spaces.
Recognised beyond SumUp as a leading Spots where multiple disciplines are solving the
expert in their field, and contribute back to it same challenges, and can bring people together to
(or if not for some reason, their profile is one solve these.
that is capable of this in the right situation).

Identifies technology that can play a strategic

enablement role to grow the business, finding
opportunities worth investing in that can
materially impact the commercial success of
the business.

Comfortable with leading Technology as a

discipline, inclusive of engineering, data, and
Agile.

Engineering Leadership
Status: this section is in consultation phase

In the simplest terms, Engineering Managers (EMs) are accountable for two things: fast flow of
value and team health. Both are in fact the same thing eventually, because only a healthy
team can build great software while without productivity, the team's health will erode quickly.

The expectations of leadership in Engineering are based on the cultural capabilities of the book
Accelerate (and the DORA reports), Team Topologies as well as Jim Collin’s Culture of
Discipline. Thus, SumUp embraces a transformational leadership paradigm that supports a
performance-oriented, generative culture. The books “Accelerate” (Jez Humble, Nicole
Forsgren), “Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0” (Jim Collins) and “No Rules Rules” (Reed Hastings)
are absolute must-reads for EMs.

Fast Flow of Value

Above anything, the Engineering Manager is responsible for the squad to accomplish its
mission by optimizing for a fast flow of value supported by a great team culture.

EP&D squads are the smallest yet fundamental organizational cell to accomplish our vision.
They design, construct and maintain the products that help millions of merchants build a
thriving business by following a squad mission that plays into the overarching strategy of
SumUp. To accomplish their mission, the squads implement an intelligent value stream that
executes several necessary steps to continuously “ship” small product improvements to
production. This value stream is in almost all cases a DevOps loop adjusted for the domain that
the mission falls into. But other valuable work outside of the DevOps loop such as an MVP, API
spec, investigation of a system degradation, configuration change, support for another squad
may also be the output of a squad. It is therefore the constant, fast flow of value that any EP&D
squad needs to optimize for.

All successful teams maintain a KaiZen mindset and seek continuous improvement with
regards to delivery, quality and team health (see capability 20; Generative Culture). The DORA
report and Accelerate describe in-depth the correlation between leadership behavior and
high-performing teams.

Continuous Delivery Capabilities

EMs help the team to implement the Continuous Delivery Capabilities:
1. use version control for all production artifacts,
2. automate your deployment process,
3. implement continuous integration,
4. use trunk-based development methods,
5. implement test automation
6. support test data management
7. shift left on security
8. implement continuous delivery

Architecture Capabilities
Engineering managers understand the technical system deeply as well as the environment and
domains in which the systems run. They help the team to remain autonomous and move fast:

9. use a loosely coupled architecture

10. architect for empowered teams

In addition, Engineering Managers are capable of moderating Domain Driven Design sessions.

Product and Process capabilities

Engineering Managers ensure that the team establishes an agile software development process
(often a flavor of Kanban or Scrum) that works well for them and helps them organize their work
and make the flow of value visible:
12. make the flow of work visible through the value stream
13. work in small batches
14. foster and enable team experimentation
Lean Management and Monitoring Capabilities
The Engineering Manager sets up the team so that the team can function autonomously and
without her presence. She helps the team to establish criteria for quality and engineering and
operational excellence that are non-compromisable as a counter-weight to optimizing for
delivery speed. These criteria are documented in a working agreement in the squad and cover
UX, code and reliability criteria.

15. lightweight change approval

16. monitor across application and infrastructure to inform business decisions
17. check system health proactively
18. improve processes and manage work with work-in-progress (wip) limits
19. visualize work to monitor quality and communicate throughout the team

Team Health
The term “manager” is sometimes misunderstood; The old definition of a manager stems from
the Industrial Revolution when power over people and capital was the driver to accomplish
results. Today, managers understand that humans are not “resources” or quantifiable “assets”
but individuals with capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, motivation, life-goals, passions,
desires, struggles and talents. Great EMs are people positive team builders and system
thinkers who help their team evolve and be successful. They understand that only a healthy,
motivated team with a fruitful culture can continuously deliver great results.

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose

The question “what makes me happy?” is no longer applicable only to one's private life but
also to how we work. The amount of time we spend with our colleagues, the dedication and
energy that we invest - all depends a lot on how well the team and SumUp helps answer this
question positively for everyone. While compensation plays an important role, research in the
field of psychology has shown that motivation and happiness depend on far more and far
deeper factors than just money and recognition. Two books stand out for SumUp that
investigate the question in the business context: Delivering Happiness and Drive. In the latter,
the author describes three main driving areas which contribute to overall, long-term motivation:
● Autonomy – Our desire to be self directed. It increases engagement over compliance.
● Mastery – The urge to get better skilled and be recognized for it
● Purpose – The desire to do something that has meaning and is important, beyond
oneself.
→ Here is a great video that summarizes the concepts.
Successful Engineering Managers understand how to translate these concepts into their teams
and build an environment where individuals are autonomous, can evolve as humans and
contribute to a higher purpose.

Cultural Capabilities
Accelerate and DORA describes several cultural capabilities that support building a healthy
team culture.

20. support a generative culture

21. encourage and support learning
22. support and facilitate collaboration among teams
23. provide resources and tools that make work meaningful
24. support or embody transformational leadership

Trust is the basis of a great team

The foundation of any functional team is trust (see the five dysfunctions of a team). Engineering
managers cater A LOT for trust in their team. EMs know a range of techniques and formats to
build trust and employ them frequently. The basis for trust is communication and so she brings
the team together often to share experiences. The communication and experiences are far
more immersive in-person rather than remote (see also sixth Agile principle). And while meeting
in the office is unfortunately not always possible, Engineering Managers try to at least optimize
for high-bandwidth communication (see Ways how we work).

Skill and Talent Development

One of the main drivers of a great team is the combination of all skills in a team. Engineering
Managers understand the skills of their teams very deeply and how the individual abilities
complement each other. A common tool to understand and develop skills within a team are
skill matrices that EMs may employ to analyze the teams capabilities and plan for future
improvements. To improve the skill matrix of a team, EMs may develop personal development
plans, training and onboarding material and work towards constantly increasing the team's
capabilities (see also the deck from Netflix on talent density). Through 1:1s and personal
development plans, the EMs work with the team members to strategically improve the skills
and/or acquire new skills (see T-shaped Engineer) and advance their career. SumUps Talent
Evolution Discussion process provides a framework that helps to guide the manager and team
member through the conversation. Another important aspect to complement the skill matrix is
hiring. A pragmatic rule of thumb for every hiring manager is to aim for talent that is better than
themselves, even if it may mean to hire above their own paygrade.
Skills can take various forms. While “hard” technical skills or knowledge about technologies are
more obvious (e.g. programming languages, testing, observability, information security, writing
documentation, etc.), the range of skills usually includes “soft” skills such as communication,
presentation, planning, structuring, diversity awareness and other skills that depend more on
interaction and behavior.

Enumeration
The biggest factor or enumeration is impact. That is why EMs work intensively with Engineers
to increase their skill and impact. As a general rule of thumb, SumUp wants engineers to earn
top-of-market for their role and experience by expecting - and helping to accomplish -
top-of-market results. It is therefore not uncommon that teams have great engineers on the
team who earn more than her Engineering Managers. Engineering Managers are to regularly
review the compensation packages of her team members to ensure that the salary is
competitive on the market and provide feedback and development plans accordingly.

Similarly, EMs also conduct regular team reviews (please find the team review description here)
for promotions but also to let go of team members when there is a mismatch between the
members expectations and capabilities and what the team needs.

Examples
Engineering Managers deeply understand the value of trust, openness, fun, excitement, safety,
praise, feedback, compensation, excellence and other cultural elements that are the
foundations for groups to be sustainably happy and productive. As a result, they constantly
think and work towards team health and culture. Some examples that are often seen in
productive engineering squads is that the team
● conducts regular retrospective meetings and follow-up with the outcomes
● gets time and “product priority” to resolve technical issues that may not have
immediate value for the customer but are necessary for the team to be efficient
● foster a generative culture, that is they optimize for high cross-functional cooperation,
build fail-safe environments where bad news lead to improvement, bridge silos, share
knowledge, fight bureaucracy and embrace change and novelty (see capability 20).
● Share helpful and actionable feedback regularly. Also expects to receive a lot of
feedback.
● Hold regular team appraisals and review pragmatic development plans. For example,
they conduct Keeper Tests conversations every 1st of May and 1st of September
● Hold blameless post-mortems
● Measure and follow-up with team health checks and the eNPS
● EMs help co-create ambitious but realistic goals for the squads and help accomplish
them.
The Genius of the AND
EMs know when to support and when to challenge. They are empathic, great listeners,
understand team dynamics but also know the potential and the capacity of the team. In more
general terms, they require the ability to be super context aware and act accordingly and
decisively using the full spectrum of possibilities. This ability is described as the genius of the
AND by Jim Collins. For Engineering Managers, this means they

● optimize for fast flow AND team health

● care about productivity AND quality
● are frugal AND invest rigorously
● attentive to nitty-gritty details AND share high-level strategy
● empathic AND directive
● support AND challenge
● short-term AND long-term thinking
● technical AND entrepreneurial
● Hands-off AND steep-in

Leaders can adopt their management style according to the team dynamics, goal, environment
and other contexts (see Competing Values Framework) AND retain a consistent, principled
behavior. As a negative example, bad leaders change their behavior or opinion depending on
who is in the room or what mood they are in. Great leaders on the contrary follow an internal,
profound set of principles that guides them in any context and situation. The consistent set of
principles leads to a predictable behavior which in turns builds trust.

Small, autonomous, cross-functional teams

With regards to organizational design, Engineering Managers implement SumUps
organizational vision by focusing on creating small, autonomous, cross-functional teams with a
crystal clear mission.
These teams aim to become fully self-sustained, self-motivated and self-managed and high
performing with none or only little influence of the manager. Managers at SumUp are often
measured by these exact attributes of their team.

In order to reach this state, EMs foster an environment where as much decision power as
possible is handed to the team and communicated effectively even to the extent that the team
can work completely autonomously without the manager (clock-building - not telling time,
systems thinking). It is not the role of the manager to make these decisions, but to ensure they
are made. They hardly ever tell what to do but rather lead by providing context of what is
important and relevant and foster an environment where the team can make decisions by
themselves (see pull vs. push systems). Yet, they need to act as a “tiebreaker” if decisions are
hard or take too long.

Communication Clarity
Sharing context can quickly become a fulltime task if done inefficiently. In fact, most of the
work that Engineering Managers do involves some form of communication. Therefore, effective
and crystal clear communication verbally and in written form is a must-have skill for any leader
at SumUp. Crystal clear communication does not mean to be bossy or directive, but rather
have a clear, structured, and objective rationale in a humble way (see also strong opinions,
weakly held). To drive change means to overcome the inertia of groups who have settled-in
with behaviors, thinking patterns and values. Energy and a lot of repetition is necessary as a
counter-force to this inertia. That is why leaders repeatedly explain to serve clarity around
goals, strategy, systems and why something is important (see Patrick Lencioni on four
disciplines of healthy organizations).
Leaders do not only communicate intensively within the team, but also help align with
stakeholders and share and converse with the organization. This is important for autonomy to
work well because the outside world will not know about the plans, ambitions, expectations,
health and productivity of the squad unless proactively communicated by members of the
teams.

Is that all?
No. In fact, this is just a high-level entry into the universe of becoming somebody who helps to
build a great organization. There are A LOT of great resources out there that help you become
better managers and leaders constantly learn and expand their knowledge to improve individual
islands of weaknesses or strengths. Here is a curated list of stuff that we recommend to read:
● Austin Tindle ’s notes on Engineering Management while he was taking the Reforge
course.
● The chapter on Engineering Management from the book “Software Engineering
Handbook at Google”

Engineering Manager levels need more work and are coming soon.

FAQ
How do you intend to roll the framework out?
From the date of adoption, we will use the framework to guide us in promotions and for new
hires. However, compensation is independent of the career framework and continues to follow
the rule that SumUp wants to pay top-quartile of the market with an equally high expectation in
performance in a given location. The career framework will help to guide conversations around
future promotions and hires but does not contradict the rule that SumUp pays according to
market standards. The process of TEDs, performance reviews and salary increases will
continue normally, but it may be that you stay with your title a little longer.

My title (e.g. Software Engineer or Senior Software Engineer) does not fit with the Step
according to the career framework. Do I now get demoted or promoted?
No. We will not demote or promote people to make them “fit” the new career framework. We
want the guideline to be applied over time for future promotions or hires. Many engineers got
promoted or hired under different circumstances and criteria in different markets and we want
to adopt the new framework in a way that does not “penalize” past decisions.

How does the career framework affect my anticipated promotion or salary increase?
The main driver for career advancement and salary increases is a continuous, visible impact on
SumUp. This has not changed at its core and should have simply gained more detail in
different facets of the framework. We expect that many parts of the framework were already
applied in the past.

Will salary and VSOPs be aligned too, for example all Senior Engineers receive the same
compensation?
No. There still a lot of intentional room for individual performance in the framework. Also,
compensation at SumUp is location-based like most other companies.

When do we do TEDs for promotions?

For TEDs we use the guidelines from the people team, described here.

TED forums focus on movement between Steps (developing to progressing, progressing to

expert/leader, etc) and all Expert/Leader & Executive Steps. For movement within a Step that
requires a significant shift in Seeds then a TED should be considered as well.

Feedback
Talk Page for Engineering Progression Framework

Known Issues
- The expectations for the "sub-steps" (Software Engineer I vs. II, Senior Software
Engineer I vs. II vs. III) aren't explicit.
Changelog
May 23, 2023 ( Martin Froehlich Felix Heck ) [ref]
- Clarified Staff Engineer role description
- Introduced Senior Engineer III (in Expert & Leadership step)