What is this?
- A timeline of my move from software developer to engineering manager, with structured advice along the way
- Anime themed, for no good reason.
Who is this for?
- A software developer considering management
- Someone currently on the path to becoming a leader
- Anyone curious about the transition from individual contributor to management.
Welcome to My Management Academy
Hi, the name’s Blake Miyazaki, but you can just call me Blake. In 2018, a catastrophic error in our employee management system enrolled me into My Management Academy, a high school for developers who want to become managers. Only a handful make it to the management track, and if I fail, I’m gonna get fired for sure!
Do I have what it takes to overcome the odds and Track Change™ my destiny? Who knows… wish me luck!
Anime was a mistake
Okay, let me try again. In 2018 I made the transition from being individual contributor software developer to engineering manager. In many companies, there is little official process or formal training behind such a transition. Too many people simply get thrown into the deep end of the role and find themselves in what can be an emotionally confronting situation. You quickly go from the comfort of your individual contributor role to making less-reversible decisions in areas you don’t have complete confidence in, having people rely upon you, and having way more meetings.
Becoming a manager is picking up a whole new job, and can be scary. I wrote this blog one year after starting the transition to management and published it internally at Atlassian, where it is now part of their manager onboarding process. It might not be reflective of how everyone has handled similar transitions, but it is based on my authentic experience. I hope this illuminates what the change to management entails, and addresses some common challenges new managers face.
Timeline
My experience could be roughly divided up into the following phases:
- Consideration: Considered becoming a manager practically from quite early in my career.
- Opportunity: Joined new team with an opportunity for leadership August 2017
- Early life: Started the role in a trial capacity about January 2018
- Mid-life crisis: July 2018
- Finale: Team lead officially in October 2018
Consideration
My personal recount
After a couple of years being a developer, I was frustrated with builds. Despite being on a front-end team—where the customer impact of your work is extremely obvious—I was craving more. The details of development started to become frustrating instead of fun. Build issues, legacy code, tech debt, and refactoring, started to feel like they were getting in the way of enjoying work.
However, when considering becoming a manager, I regret focussing too much on these “push” forces. What’s more important is pull forces, or “motivators” towards the management role. There are many roles that don’t involve refactoring or fixing builds, so there needs to be more than just push forces.
What pulled me towards management in the end was a personal goal: I wanted to be capable of being a leader. I didn’t feel capable at the time: I noticed when even making small decisions as an engineer, say, during a planning meeting, I’d have a mini panic attack internally. How did my manager do this everyday? I wanted to be able to do what they do.
In addition to that, after thinking about it, I liked the balance of technical and product-oriented thinking involved in the engineering manager role, and the ability to contribute to people’s growth. Everyone remembers their favourite high school teacher and the impact they had—I think managers are the same—and I liked the idea of being able to have that impact on someone’s life. After understanding the motivators, I decided yep, I wanna try this thing out.
In short,
- Expected feelings: restless, unfulfilled, drive, ambition
At the beginning of this stage, start doing:
- Be a strong individual contributor: In general, I recommend being at a senior level of your craft before trying for management. As a leader, you’ll be interacting with a wide range of people about your craft, so a solid foundation is helpful.
- Introspection: have a good old fashioned think about: your role, what you like and dislike, what you’re missing from your current role, and if you’re happy.
- Information gathering: try to get an insight in what your leaders do
- Get a taste of the role: mentoring is a great way to do this.
By the end of this stage, you should:
(aka “signals that you’re ready for the next stage”)
- Commit to wanting to try the role
- Communicate and be open about that to your manager and peers, who can help you find opportunities and share responsibilities
- Keep an eye open for management opportunities
Opportunity
My personal recount
A company restructure proved timely for a chance to look for a team with leadership opportunities. It was important that I was open and clear about that; it meant that people could point me to teams with open roles that I was looking for. After joining such a team, their Real Manager helped me start picking up more responsibilities: running agile ceremonies like standup, planning meeting, and participating in more strategic stuff.
At this time, I was still doing regular engineer work plus these other responsibilities. Time management was starting to become important, I found myself feeling a bit stretched and needing all the hours of every workday, and more, to get stuff done. In hindsight, this was because I put too much on my own plate.
The org chart can be confusing in such setups—myself and the other engineers were all reporting to Real Manager—but Real Manager wasn’t really involved in the day-to-day work. The unclear responsibilities were between myself and Real Manager was further amplified by the fact that I started doing 1-1s with the team.
I think this was a mental inflection point—starting to do 1-1s—so I’m going to talk about it a bit more. It was very awkward for me to start doing these; I’m thankful that the team was very supportive and keen to start doing them. What helped me was thinking that there’s no harm in offering to do 1-1s, so I approached everyone individually saying “Hey, since I’m more involved day-to-day than
It’s good to be open and explain that you want the practice and are trying management stuff out. Given that you’re doing other responsibilities like planning and standup and stuff, it’s probably obvious anyway.
In short,
- Expected feelings: time-poor, lots of things going on, imposter syndrome, excitement, learning a lot
At the beginning of this stage, start doing:
- Take feature lead opportunities and some responsibilities of your current team lead. This may be hard depending on the team, so consider switching it up.
- Have a shared understanding with your team that you are trying this out. Pick up light responsibilities: standup, planning, etc. basically take stuff off your manager’s hands related to your group of people.
- When planning the sprint’s work, count yourself as half time dev or even less. This will be really hard to do at first because when you are planning and have the capability to do it, you will want to commit to getting it done.
By the end of this stage, you should:
- Consider going back to your previous role. It’s still a bit early to know if leadership is not for you at this stage, but if you really really dislike the extra responsibilities, begin the transition back.
- Have picked up more serious responsibilities: doing 1-1s, being the contact point for your team, working directly with other leaders to progress projects.
- Have a shared understanding with the team about your role and your Real Manager’s role.
- Be doing close to zero hands-on development.
Early life
My personal recount
I’ll be real, this was one of the hardest times of my life. It was like learning how to breathe again. This 6 months was spent wrangling a high impact project that had a lot of stakeholders. There were a lot of ‘firsts’ in this time period, like running big cross-team project kick-offs, dealing with reporting upwards, measuring team success, and more serious 1-1s.
Damb, those early 1-1s are hard. The feeling, the first time you’re sitting there, and realising it’s up to you to drive this conversation? Terrifying. Oh lord, my manager, grand-manager, and the CEO are subscribed to notifications on my project updates. I have no idea what to type. Should I say iy’s at-risk? What if I pick the wrong estimated ship date? Terrifying.
Everything has suddenly become difficult, confusing, and scary. Even things you took for granted—like knowing what you’ve done in the day—becomes another challenge, and you have to learn it all from zero.
No engineering work meant no longer having work tracked for free in tickets. I started using Todoist as a “things I need to action” list. If I didn’t do that, I would frequently just forget and have to apologise for “dropping the ball” because that’s what you say in Business. I felt like I would start the day with 5 todos, complete 3, and end the day with 7; while at the end of the day having no idea what I accomplished.
I flubbed (made mistakes) a lot. I often could not sleep because I was trying to work out “well if we got X person doing Y thing then maybe we could get this done on time”. This was extra frustrating because I knew this was not how you manage a team (at 1am while lying in bed), but I couldn’t stop myself.
I leaned heavily on my manager as a therapist. This was useful. About once a fortnight I’d ask “If I wanted to go back to being an engineer, how would I go about that?” and, bless him, he would just shake his head and be like “so we’re having this conversation again,” and coach me on how to solve whatever problem I was having that week.
In short,
At the beginning of this stage, start doing:
- All “informal” management responsibilities. Even formal ones like promotions and performance should be “paired” on, as you likely have the most relevant information related to these processes.
- Delegating more project work: this is a win-win, you help individuals improve and take more responsibility, and you improve your coaching abilities.
- Navigating through problems using the feelings matrix below.
By the end of this stage, you should:
- Continue to consider going back to your previous role. Be really careful here—in terms of personal growth and rate of learning, this is a peak. Before reverting back, try taking some leave. Reflect on, and really understand your feelings about the role.
- Feel comfortable with most of the stuff described in the feelings matrix below.
| Feeling | How to handle |
|---|---|
| You are doing less tracked work, so it is harder to track what you are doing. Track what you need to do using some kind of action-tracking technique. Ticking things off, moving things to a done pile, or whatever, reminds you of the work you are doing. I use Todoist, but any app that you can 1) easily mark things as done and 2) review at the end of the day works well. |
| Similar mitigation to above: adjust your action-tracking technique to make it very quick and easy to get things out of your head and into the world (post-it, app, spreadsheet row, …). The vast majority of people cannot remember everything they agree to. This is not due to a lack of good intention, it’s simply very hard to do. I use Todoist, but any app that you can 1) easily mark things as done and 2) review at the end of the day works well. |
| You are in a growth phase, and are expected to flub. Be open and honest that you are learning to yourself, and your team. It is unlikely that others have as high expectations of you in this phase as high as you have of yourself. This is a new job, almost entirely different to what you were doing before; you’re learning, not inherently incapable. Be kinder to yourself |
| Firstly, things go wrong all the time. That doesn’t mean you are failing. Remember, not everything’s your (or anyone else’s personal) fault. It is an opportunity for everyone to learn. Train yourself to notice the wins. Use peer feedback from your team to understand what you’re doing well. Acknowledge your contribution to things that have gone well. It’s particularly hard to notice what isn’t going badly. A lot of the work you do is probably preventing things from being much worse—that’s worth acknowledging too! |
| You are probably doing too much. It’s very common in this phase to not understand the scope of your role, and to do anything and everything yourself. Discuss with your manager about what you don’t need to do, and consider running a roles and responsibilities play. Delegate some of your responsibilities. This is actually a nice thing to do, because it presents opportunities for your team members to grow. It doesn’t reduce your workload of these responsibilities to zero, at least at first—as they may need to be coached—but it pays off in the long run. |
| Step 1: eject yourself—sitting on my balcony and looking out over the world helps me Step 2: find the cause. This can be done by: talking to mentors/friends/any listener, or taking some introspection time to understand your cause for discomfort. |
| Connect with other managers. They’ve done this before, and know how to help you. |
Mid-life crisis
My personal recount
I went on holidays to Korea and Japan for a few weeks in April, desperately needing a break. I came back to the role with a renewed perspective. I still didn’t enjoy work, but I wasn’t getting as stressed or emotional about it—I guess because I was recharged on high quality ramen. And by the end of the crisis, I was enjoying work again. There were two main changes in my thinking that contributed to this:
- Learning to recognise how I am useful to the team. I never recognised, let alone celebrated, that things going well for the team could be the result of what I was doing.
- Learning not to tie my self-worth to how the project was going.
Expanding on usefulness: I always focused on how I wasn’t having fun in the role. Continuing on the advice of my manager, I started using peer feedback with the team to better understand instead how I was useful to the team. Embarrassingly, almost every piece of positive feedback was a surprise to me. This helped me be more motivated to continue in the role because I felt more useful.
Expanding on self-worth: The holiday allowed me to come back with a bit healthier separation from the project, and I recognised that I was tying my self-worth to how the project was going. On top of that, a colleague hit me with a truth bomb: the only certainty about projects is that they don’t go to plan; managing a project is all about how you deal with the problems as they arise.
This helped me understand it’s not always my fault when things go wrong, and to focus my energy on finding solutions, instead of beating myself up or getting stressed about it.
On the more concrete side of things, this time period was where I started taking actions that helped the wider team: firstly establishing ways to hear the team’s concerns, contributing to team processes and improving them, as well as solidifying and understanding the team’s work cycle from idea conception to being in the hands of customers.
In short,
Expected feelings: relief, feeling useful, desire to improve
At the beginning of this stage, start doing:
- Identifying and improving individuals’, and the team’s, concerns/problems and inefficiencies
By the end of this stage, you should:
- No longer feeling like you’re treading water—you’ve made concrete improvements to the team, and you recognise that!
- Continue to consider going back to your previous role. At this point you should have a good grasp of the role and what you like and don’t like about it. If you decide to go back, that’s okay! Learning more about what you like and don’t like is always valuable, and it’s not like the skills are going to go to waste.
Finale
My personal recount
After getting the official “manager” title, very little changed. It’s a checkbox in some employee management system, and it felt like that in real life too.
The main impact was finally being able to simply answer “yes” when asked “hey, are you the lead of <your team>?”. I didn’t realise how much micro-stress there was being like “well YES kind of well I’m on trial ah YIKES you don’t need my life story but I guess you could call me the tech lead although officially I’m simply a developer haHAA, anyway how can I help you?”
Despite the official title, it also still feels like I’m just regurgitating various mentors’ advice day-to-day. I’ve been told this is normal though, and according to them, they often did not invent the advice that they gave me. It’s simply passed down generation to generation, slightly altered according to each manager’s style all the way down.
By the end of this stage, you should:
- Celebrate! You’ve gone out of your comfort zone massively, and should be proud of yourself.
Conclusion
Whew! All that talking really takes it out of you, huh? Overall, I really wish someone told me this stuff before I started at My Management Academia, so I hope this helps!
It looks like I’m safe from being fired this time, but for anyone else, remember: you, too, can Track Change™ your destiny!
