Challenges when moving from a tech lead to an engineering manager

Challenges when moving from a tech lead to an engineering manager I’ve done this journey myself and having been an engineering manager for just over a year now, I think now is a good time to share some of the challenges I’ve faced and lessons I’ve learnt along the way.

As a technical lead of the team, you’re seen as the one to be driving the team forward. Facilitating technical discussions, system architecture, and driving a quality product. As well as mentoring, coding, code reviews and much more.

Let’s just say that theres a lot of work you do as a technical lead and are accountable for!

You’ve worked so hard, your hard work has been noticed and you have been given a well deserved promotion to engineering manager.

As an engineer manager you’re now responsible for the team as a whole, their career development, coaching & mentoring. You also have to think about the bigger picture more, so not just the team you’re in or the product you’re working on but the entire department/function, such as:

• What sort of culture do we want in the company
• What skills are we missing to align to the business objectives
• Recruitment
• And of course the admin work (approving holidays, resignations, promotions and performance reviews).

Heres the top 3 lessons and experience I want to share with you all.  There are bad things and I think everyone in their career will experience them and it’s not a bad thing at all, it’s all part of the journey so enjoy it!

**1. You want to code but you shouldn’t code. ** You will find that if you make this transition and have been hands on for a long time (8+ year) you might find it frustrating that you haven’t coded in days or weeks in fact. You’ll have the desire to step in and do code reviews because you can’t pick up tickets. This is natural but you have to remind yourself that it’s not your job anymore and you now need to let the team handle it and make mistakes.

2. Fear of your team failing As someone who looks after a group of people or an engineering team in my case, you will be proud of that team, what they’ve produced over time and how each of them are progressing in their career. This could lead to you get too attached when times are hard, a deadline is pretty close or there’s issues with the product that affecting customers. You might foresee the solution an engineer might make or the team as a whole wont work, that they might have missed a key requirement that wasn’t found during development or testing.

For this you will have to use your judgement to know when as a manager you should step in and provide some advise or guidance to the team or to let them try and fail. But the key message here is that we need to make sure our teams are allowed to fail and we build up a culture that failure is ok and part of the learning process.

As a manager we are here to make that environment safe and at the same time project the business. The last thing we want is a failure to cost the company millions of pounds or someone to get fired.

3. Don’t tell them, you should challenge and ask the “whys” The big difference between being a technical lead and a manager is that the team aren’t looking to you for answers anymore, they look at you for advise and guidance when they need it. It’s so temping at times when someone isn’t sure to just tell them what to do, if you feel yourself doing this you should try and stop yourself.

You should ask questions like, “What have you tried so far?” or “What challenges do you foresee with the solution you’ve proposed?” rather than the typical “This won’t working because of x or y”.

Thank you for reading and I hope you found this useful!