The Secret to Engineering Team Management During Vacation Season

Summer should be the season of recovery, but many technology leaders hesitate to step away. With sprint deadlines, onboarding, compliance tasks, and reduced team capacity, taking time off feels risky. This is the stress test of engineering team management. Can delivery stay on track when people, including you, are out of office? 

If one absence breaks momentum, the problem isn’t scheduling. It’s structure. 

Part I: How Technology Leaders Can Take a Break 

Build a Culture of Ownership 

High-performing teams are built on ownership, not dependency. When leaders stay constantly online, teams assume they should do the same. But rest should be a default, not something earned through exhaustion.  

Netflix’s well-known vacation policy reflects this mindset. Employees aren’t limited by a fixed number of days off. Instead, they’re expected to take time off responsibly and stay aligned with business priorities.  

Strong engineering team management means creating space for others to lead, make decisions, and move work forward in your absence. This is what takes a team from dependable to truly resilient. 

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Appoint an Acting Lead  

Assigning an acting lead while you're away is a chance to build leadership capacity within the team. This approach helps surface future leaders, highlight skill gaps, and create space for growth. It also shows your team that trust is part of the culture. 

When handing off responsibilities, make sure to include: 

• Sprint status and upcoming priorities 
• Access to tools, systems, and documentation 
• Key internal and external contacts 
• Clear availability guidelines for if and when to contact you 

To structure ownership even better, use the RACI Matrix, a project management acronym for the different responsibility types within a project: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. This framework helps define who owns what while you're out, minimizes confusion, and ensures nothing slips through the cracks. It also promotes smoother delegation and supports long-term leadership development inside your engineering team. Here’s an example: 

To support this, invest in cross-training team members before time off. It ensures your team can step into new roles confidently and keeps delivery smooth even when leads are away. 

Create a Self-Managing Team 

Delegation doesn’t start the day before vacation. It takes time and intention to build а team that operates smoothly without constant direction. That comes from sharing context early, encouraging initiative, and creating space for others to lead. 

As Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last explains, teams thrive when they feel supported. Leaders who focus on purpose and reduce fear in the environment build the kind of trust that lasts beyond their presence. Before taking a break, revisit the bigger picture with your team. When people are clear on what matters and why, they don’t need daily check-ins to stay on course. 

Of course, stepping back is rarely easy. Even with trust in place, it can be hard to release control and allow others to grow through experience. As Pat Kua, former CTO at N26, puts it: 

“A hard lesson for the Tech Lead is allowing people to fail, allowing them to make mistakes.” 

Progress depends on people having the space to try, reflect, and grow. That’s how they build confidence in their own decisions. Google’s Project Aristotle reinforces this with data. After studying more than 180 teams, researchers found that psychological safety had the biggest influence on effectiveness. It all comes down to feeling safe enough to speak up, ask questions, and take ownership without fear. Over time, this creates a team that can lead itself. A manager’s absence no longer slows things down. Delegation becomes a steady pattern, and time away becomes a chance to reset, without it being risky. 

Part II: Managing Your Team’s Vacation Season Smoothly 

Develop Resilient Systems 

Some teams must slow down when someone takes time off. Others keep building with confidence. The difference often comes from how knowledge and responsibilities are shared across the group. When people are cross-trained, no one carries the full weight alone. Everyone is equipped to step in, and no single role becomes a bottleneck. 

Spotify’s engineering model brings this to life. Each squad works as a small, self-sufficient team with ownership over a product area. Engineers, designers, and product managers decide how they operate, what tools they use, and how they deliver results. They stay aligned with company priorities without relying on top-down decisions. Everyone understands the goals and the work, so if someone takes time off, the rest of the team doesn’t lose direction. This structure goes further through what Spotify calls chapters and guilds - spaces where people with similar skills connect across different squads. These communities create a wider safety net of knowledge and support.  

You can apply the same thinking within your own team by: 

• Locking in vacations early and communicating them clearly across roles 
• Using fair approval models that balance workload, like first-come, rotational, or phase-based approaches 
• Assigning backups for critical functions such as QA, product management, and DevOps 
• Using planning tools like Jira Capacity Planning, Tempo, or Float to visualize leave overlaps and mitigate delivery risk 

Building resilience into the way you work helps your team grow with fewer disruptions. And it gives people the space to rest, knowing the work will keep moving forward. 

Deliver the Essentials 

Summer schedules reshape how teams operate. When people are away, it's easy to feel the pressure to maintain the same pace. Instead of powering through, this can be a chance to step back and look at what truly matters right now. One way to regain focus is the so-called backlog grooming. It gives teams space to realign with what’s realistic based on who’s available and how much time there is. When priorities are clear, it becomes easier to make intentional decisions about what to move forward and what to pause. 

Lighter weeks can be the right time to surface tasks that don’t always make it to the top of the sprint. Fixing small bugs, documenting features, resolving technology debt, or simply running a retrospective are often overlooked during busy delivery periods. With fewer people around, these kinds of activities help keep the work moving without creating unnecessary stress. 

A small change like adding a “Can wait until full staff” column in your board can help the entire team stay in sync. It avoids second-guessing, reduces mental load, and ensures that effort goes where it’s needed most. 

And when your internal efforts reach their limit, external support can lighten the load at the right moment. When your team’s capacity is stretched, partnering with an experienced software development company who can step in seamlessly makes a big difference. Whether it’s handling QA, assisting with DevOps, or helping push a feature forward, having an experienced partner can relieve pressure without disrupting your flow. It’s a way to protect your team’s energy while keeping delivery steady, especially during periods of absence. 

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Automate for Smarter Engineering Team Management 

When half the team is off on well-earned vacations, everyday roadblocks can start to feel overwhelming. Questions fall through the cracks, tasks stall quietly, and what used to be a five-minute update turns into a full meeting. While your team recharges, automation keeps the wheels turning. Instead of adding more to everyone’s plate, it clears the noise.  

Imagine getting a quick summary of key Jira or GitHub updates without digging through threads or seeing at a glance who’s available and what risks are coming up. Internal requests land with the right person, pull requests get a gentle nudge, and delivery stays on track without constant check-ins. Even with fewer hands on deck, practical automations help teams maintain clarity, reduce stress, and keep working well together. 

The Real Test for Team Readiness 

Taking time off should not feel like a risk. Engineering team management is tested most when capacity dips and priorities shift. 

Summer is the perfect moment to test how well your team operates without you and how well they support each other. Can they move forward without constant direction? Can they make decisions, solve problems, and keep quality high even when capacity is lower? That kind of resilience is built through trust, shared ownership, and well-designed systems. 

Sometimes, the only thing standing between you and a real break is the right kind of support. Partnering with a team that integrates quickly and works seamlessly alongside yours can keep the momentum going while people are away. 

Ready to unplug without risking delivery? Explore how our engineering teams can keep your project on schedule.