3 Main Learnings When I Grew From Engineer To Manager

What makes you a good engineer will not necessarily make you a good manager. There are different skills needed to excel in one or the other. As you grow more and more as an engineer, you need to find challenges for yourself, especially when you're a senior engineer for some time. Management is a different skill set that you need to develop and can be a great next step for you. In this video, I'll be sharing how I grew from engineer to manager and my 3 main learnings. So, a lot of people may feel discouraged about management, thinking that it's not for them, but I'll tell you how I knew that management might be for me. I was always good at collaborating and communicating when it came to certain projects or functionalities. I wanted to always make sure we have the correct requirements and that we are building the right things. I always wanted to also fully understand the needs and find the best solutions that would fit those needs. I also understood the importance of managing expectations. You can do the best work in the world, but if the expectations are not met correctly, all the effort is wasted. So I wanted to always ensure that this was done correctly, and that automatically brought me to the place where I wish to have a bigger impact on the projects and the team, not only in fine details, but also a lot more say in the direction and the overall team in general. Now let me tell you that I wasn't so decisive if I actually wanted to become a manager. Like a lot of engineers, I was contemplating a lot regarding the direction of my career. The questions, what is going to be the next step for me, and should I go into management architecture route, or should I grow as an IC, those were always on my mind. I believe that my growth was stagnating because I didn't know that. I was always leaning more towards management because of the reasons mentioned before. I was always good technically as well, but I was standing out from others because my main focus wasn't on technical solutions and approaches. I was always very focused on building the right things and communicate well. Now let's talk about how I actually became a manager. I've had discussions with my manager at the time that management might be the right path for me, but I wasn't very convincing. The reason was that I was overthinking for far too long. As I found out later, my manager was surprised that I was actually interested in the team lead role, and she thought that I wouldn't be. I was in the company for some time and had a track record of successfully delivering multiple projects. The company was going through the restructuring, and there were new teams created. My manager at the time approached me and offered me the team lead position, which I accepted. And yes, I didn't know what I was actually getting myself into. It was quite a big change for me. Let's get into that next. I didn't know a lot about management at the time, I read a couple of books, but that was all. So naturally I made a lot of mistakes. What brought me to be successful engineer didn't work for me well as I became a team lead. I tried to do too much overall. As an engineer, I was so used to being in control, so naturally I wanted to mimic this behavior when I first became a manager. I wanted to be in all of the details and even minor things all the time, and also make decisions about everything. This brought me that I didn't delegate enough and I didn't assign clear ownership and empower others. I learned that this is not the way to go when I was close to burning out. Working long hours and having so many things on my mind, it didn't work out pretty good. Based on this experience, I knew I needed to make a change. I knew that I needed to delegate more and also empower people to make decisions themselves. That's when things started to look a lot better for me. Now let's go to my 3 main learnings when I first started as a manager. So the first one is managing your time is really, really important. I found myself in a position where a lot of people needed my help, advice, or they would just like to chat about something. It's really hard to say no to these things. I needed to learn to say no to such things that I believe were not so important, critical, or even needed. As much as it's important to help as many people as possible, there needs to be a correct balance between meetings and your own contribution. What I learned is that the best way to do this is to dedicate particular blocks to your own focus time and the rest to the managerial time. For example, you can block 4 hours, 3 days a week for your own focus time and the rest to managerial time. I suggest to block as many hours as needed. Try to find the right balance for yourself that works for you. Let's go to the second learning: you can control what you can control. I often felt that there were many things that I would like to change, but I didn't fully understand that I don't make all the decisions across the business. I can control the changes or responsibilities of my team, but for teams outside of my area, I wasn't able to make decisions for them. What I learned is that the best thing you can do is to establish great relationships across the organization and try to provide feedback or suggestions to people who are responsible for a particular part of the business. And now let's go to the third learning: stay technical but avoid going into too many details. I wanted to be too much in those fine details, as said before, and this This brought me close to burning out. I've learned that it's important to stay technical no matter if you have a lot of managerial responsibilities. To help the team the most, you need to understand as well as have strong opinions about particular technical decisions or directions, but don't go into too many details. Rather delegate those details to the team. You need to be involved in important decisions that are crucial for the business, but delegate the small details which are not so important. You can get overwhelmed quickly by too much information if you have too much things on your mind. I'm curious to hear about your thoughts on growing from engineer to manager. Make sure to share them in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great engineering leader. There are more than 100,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.