Becoming a Tech Leader: How to Shift from IC to Leader and What to Expect on the Way There
Having the right expectations helps you adapt faster
Shifting the midset from being an individual contributor (IC) to a manager is one of the most important changes in the career transition. Your responsibilities expand from solely the technical side to people and product management.
In the guest post today,
will walk us through what to expect during the transition and how to navigate the shift in responsibilities.If you like her story, check out her work in The White Belt Manager.
Let’s Start
If you are considering a career in leadership, maybe your head is popping with lots of questions: How can I get started? What should I expect as a junior leader? What is my day-to-day going to look like?
Mine sure was! I first started as a team lead when I was still a mid-level backend engineer. Although I understood the basics of the job, I had a hard time figuring out how to balance my priorities and what was expected from me in the new role.
Change in Mindset: From Individual Contributor to Leader
Honestly, it’s never too early to start practicing your leadership skills, even if you are still an individual contributor.
Usually, most people don’t start their career in leadership overnight. Instead, you will likely progressively become a tech lead in your team by mindfully changing your approach.
In my case, I started shifting my focus towards team-related topics when I was a backend engineer. I realized I had an interest in making our processes better and began to help make tickets easier to understand, work with other backend engineers as a mini-team so our collaboration was always smooth, and occasionally led some retrospectives.
These actions (as well as strong support from my previous manager) positively impacted the decision to make me the next team leader.
Change in Priorities: Balancing out Tech, Product, and People
In most stages of your career as a leader, you will find three key pillars: Tech, product, and people.
Tech
If you are transitioning into a leadership role from an engineering background, this area will probably be more familiar to you.
As a technical leader, you will have to display some technical competence (that will vary through the different stages of your career).
When I first became a team lead, I was basically a half-time engineer / half-time manager. So I was expected to still significantly contribute to the codebase plus technically define the projects.
However, now that I’m an engineer manager, I’m not expected to code in my current company. My technical competence is now more focused on helping define a tech strategy for the team and the department.
Product
Now, the product owner of your team will likely become your new best friend.
You must be aligned with them since they will be the owners of the product, but you will be the owner of its delivery.
In plain terms, that means you will have to understand what the product owner is planning to do, and you will have to share candid feedback about its feasibility and how it can fit on the roadmap.
You will now work together on helping the team succeed when it comes to delivering new features.
People
This area is probably where many engineers-become-leaders struggle. Depending on your role definition, you might have people manager responsibilities (e.g., having to take care of career progression, handling salaries, and other HR topics, etc) or not.
Either way, you’ll now have a lot of eyes staring at you.
For your team to respect you as a leader, you will have to act like one. A couple of times in my career, I had managers who were too focused on the technical part of the job. They rarely made me feel like I had room for failure (and therefore, room for learning), and I felt really uncomfortable whenever I had to share any feedback with them. To me, it seemed like they never listened or that what I had to say was not important.
This was true to the point that one of them was really surprised when I decided to quit. Even when, from my point of view, I had been warning for some months!
In my experience, very few people want to have a leader like that (even if some people are used to it). To avoid that, you should nurture psychological safety in your team and get trained to understand its diversity.
By understanding people and helping them show their (close-to-)true selves, your team will become more powerful.
What to Expect?
Firstly, you should clarify the expectations for your role in your organization. I purposely used the umbrella term “technical leader” in this post because your first opportunity may present under different names depending on how your company works.
Usually, your first chances might come under the name of “tech lead”, “team lead” or “squad lead”. Normally these roles are still heavier in the technical part and have little to zero people management responsibilities.
However, roles such as “engineering manager” regularly expect less weight on the technical side and much more on the people and product dimensions.
You have to understand what’s expected from you and your current role to understand your priorities and how to balance them out.
When I became a team lead, I was very close to burnout for this reason. The job included people management responsibilities (and an imminent performance review cycle) and I struggled to efficiently balance my responsibilities.
I felt I was expected to contribute as an engineer in the same way I did when I was an individual contributor. I wanted to do everything, but there were not enough hours in the day (nor did I have enough mental bandwidth). I ended up working more extra hours than I’d like to admit but what was worse: I frequently held the feeling that I was not enough.
That’s probably the unspoken part of the job. Making things go smoothly when you are going through your own struggles is not that easy.
That’s why I strongly recommend clarifying what’s expected from you, both from your managers and from your team! Getting feedback about what your team actually needs (vs what you think they need) can really help to better target your efforts.
Final words
The beauty (and the curse) of this new role is that it's dynamic. Now your team is your number 1 priority, and therefore you will need to adjust to what your team needs.
Especially at the beginning, it can feel weird not being so active on the codebase anymore. You might feel you are not doing enough. (I for sure did when I was starting!)
It’s normal to feel that way because your working identity is switching. But remember being kind to yourself and remembering that now you are just doing a different job.
A job in which your previous knowledge is a must, but your priorities and responsibilities are different.
Wrap Up
Really appreciate
for sharing her experience. If you’d like to know more, check out her publication The White Belt Manager.Thank you for reading the post!
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