What to Expect When Moving from Tech Lead to Engineering Manager

Are you a technical lead considering going on the management path? Or already making that transition and would like to know what stumbling blocks to expect.

While there are some obvious new skills to exercise or develop, like people management, business strategy, and creating and executing a vision, the challenges don’t stop there. Being an engineering manager can be an exciting and dynamic role, but the transition may not suit everyone.

In this article, I delve into some less apparent challenges that new software managers often run into or ones I faced when embarking on my management journey. Call me shallow, but I recall being taken aback when reading a Dibert comic I noticed that the pointy-haired boss now represented me more than Alice/Asok/Dibert/Wally! If you’re considering or have decided to make that transition, read on!

1. As a tech lead, you provide solutions and answers to technical problems. However, as a manager, you are less in the role of providing answers and more in the business of creating an environment to bring out the best solutions and ideas from your team. It would be best if you prepared for a mindset shift. The temptation to provide all the answers can be hard to resist. A colleague of mine needed help with this aspect. He had excellent ideas and a small team that looked up to him. It worked in the beginning; they could move fast and create effective solutions, but eventually, this model limited their ability to grow. The manager could only scale his team once he built more independent thinkers and leaders within his team. You will need to learn to empower your team to come up with their solutions and resist being the source of answers.
2. Sooner or later, your coding skills will likely become rusty. As a tech lead, though you work with your team to review code, set coding standards, oversee architectural decisions, etc., at the end of the day, you can put your blinders on and go back to writing code. As an engineering manager, you oversee many more aspects of your team’s work. Eventually, you run out of bandwidth, and writing code becomes easier to delegate than ensuring everything runs smoothly and effectively. Even in the early days of management, my days were way less predictable. I was often met with production, organizational, or personnel issues that required immediate attention to avoid disastrous cascading effects on many more people, quickly making me a bottleneck for anyone depending on me for code delivery. It only made sense to take on non-critical code work, which I could do on the rare quiet days; as my responsibilities grew, it got harder and harder to find time to write code other than as a hobby or for learning unless you have many extra hours on hand outside work. Be sure of how you feel about this aspect of growing in the management direction.
3. Another challenge will be getting used to the long hours of interacting with people and fewer hours spent in the comfort of your computer. Don’t take this lightly. People are way more complex than code. The problems with computers are still finite, and even for the most difficult issues, a few hours of digging through discussions on various online forums and debugging through code, logs, memory, or call stack will usually pinpoint the problem. It is also reasonable to split the problem into various potential issues and work in a group to find the root cause or resolution. Despite all the experience pulling late nights of debugging code, I realize that dealing with people is infinitely more complex, and it’s much harder to explain the problem and seek counsel from others effectively. One needs to be more self-reliant and resourceful to deal with personnel issues. It takes more energy and investment, especially as an introvert which techies disproportionately tend to be (on a side note, introverted leadership styles are garnering more respect nowadays). You will likely need to invest more time to recharge your energy outside of work.
4. It would be best if you had a genuine interest in the growth and development of your team. If this skill is not natural to you, take heart. It is generally believed these days that leadership skills can be cultivated and aren’t innate. Though some people are more naturally gifted leaders, the truth is that developing soft skills and leadership skills is a lifelong journey for most of us. Building relationships was not a natural skill set for me early in my career. I did a lot of observation, reading, and deliberate training to cultivate this skill set. I will write about this in more detail in a few days and will link to that article when I do. For now, know that it is essential for you to develop your coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring skills to help your employees develop into leaders themselves.
5. Despite all your good intentions, your management style won’t work for some. Be open to feedback and learn from your mistakes to improve your management skills, but be prepared to have some failures. Leadership and management are not a one size fits all solution. A popular contemporary leadership style is called situational leadership, which encourages you to fit your leadership style to the situation or relationship at hand. For example, as a generalization, you may need to provide more guidance and direction to a fresh graduate while offering empowerment and autonomy to a seasoned individual on your team. I’ve been fortunate to enjoy a high retention rate throughout my leadership career, but there was an internal hire for who, to put it bluntly, my style wasn’t a fit. After going back and forth on the decision to join my team, he decided to give it a go but left my team within weeks because he felt like I was too diplomatic in a highly politicized situation. Be prepared to be flexible and adapt to different people and situations but also know your core values and where you’re unwilling to compromise.
6. Though I strongly encourage authenticity, there will be times when you’ll need to maintain composure despite personal challenges. As a manager, your team will look to you for guidance and support, and your demeanor will be a significant influence on the team's culture. Especially during challenging times, most successful leaders emanate calm and wisdom. Again, this is a skill that can be cultivated. Taking it to the next step, if your team is going through rough times, you may need to be resilient and keep a game face on, even during personally challenging times. I am fortunate; this is one of the skills that comes to me naturally. I’ve been called the eye of the storm in a particularly rough time. Think Captain Picard-level coolness. It does take its toll somewhere, though, and again; I find I often need other ways to recharge after going through these tough patches.
7. Downtime is harder to come by. On most teams, development has a nice rhythm of intense coding, then the testing and release phase. Even with Agile, CI/CD, and more frequent incremental releases, the software has a natural cycle of planning, development, testing, release, and incremental changes, offering periods of varying intensity and hence shifts of intense work vs. downtime. For me, the periods of heads-down coding doubled as a time to recharge. In a management role, this kind of cycle does not exist. My days are quite dynamic and unpredictable with a larger surface area of problems to handle. Between production issues, release roadblocks, personnel matters, stakeholder management, etc. something always needs my intense focus and undivided attention. It can make life exciting but I rarely find an opportunity to relax at work. It is important to prioritize and manage your time effectively to avoid burnout.
8. You find yourself on the other side of meetings. As an individual contributor, you may have found meetings to be tedious and unproductive, and found plenty of opportunities to vent about them. However, as a manager, you begin to find these essential to reduce communication overhead and efficiently bring everyone on the same page. Though you fully understand the disruptive nature and even inefficiency of meetings, it may be hard to strike the right balance between meetings vs. offline communication and keeping everyone informed. Slack has helped to a large degree.
9. Initially, you may feel awkward receiving credit for your team’s work. As a manager, you are responsible for your team’s performance, and their success reflects on you. However, it can be uncomfortable to accept credit for the work of others. While it’s critical to give credit where it’s due on your team, it is also important to recognize your own contributions which may feel less concrete than before. Once you take accountability for a few failures on behalf of your team, you realize it cuts both ways and becomes more comfortable.
10. Accomplishments, contributions, and new skills are less tangible compared to technical skills. Initially, it can be hard to put a finger on whether or not you had a productive week. A key management skill I developed was reflecting on my week on Friday evenings along with planning for the next week. Though the plans promptly flew out the window as each week brought its own fresh challenges, reflecting upon it at the end helped me understand patterns of problems, identify key accomplishments, and avoid dropping the ball on things that were deprioritized due to emergencies. Leadership skill development is also harder to quantify as it occurs more on a continuum compared to the more discrete technical skills. It’s important to work with mentors who can help identify blind spots, fill skill gaps, and also provide positive feedback when your own accomplishments and growth aren’t obvious to you.

In conclusion, there will be plenty of challenges to overcome as you transition from the role of a technical lead to a manager and leader. As a technical lead, you are likely already demonstrating certain skills that transfer over well to the role of a manager such as communication skills, time management, strategic thinking, and continuous learning. The rest can be acquired over time. Remember leadership is a journey and there is always room for improvement for everyone.

I hope reading this article equipped you with the awareness to navigate this transition with greater ease and confidence.