What I wish I knew before becoming a manager in tech

Talk from productboard's Engineering Leadership meetup https://www.facebook.com/events/512347085981164 held on 28th November 2019

Transcript

1. What I wish I knew before becoming a manager in tech Vojtěch Vondra @vvondra
2. • “Managing people can’t be that hard.” • “My boss has no idea what they’re doing.” • “If they let me, I could do a better job than them.” • “Managers are useless, we’d be so much faster without them” Me, some years ago, as an engineer
3. Expectation time skill Bam! Became an Engineering Manager
4. Reality time skill Perhaps Senior Engineer, but Junior Manager
6. in other words: I still don’t fully understand what the role is about
7. Relying on past accomplishments and technical authority within your current team...
8. ...won’t really work if you switch jobs.
9. Your past engineering skills are a great crutch to start... ...but very quickly start working on dropping them.
10. Old hard skills not as useful anymore
12. Learning as a developer Source
13. Learning as a manager Radical Candor
14. Learning as a manager
16. Understand your company’s and your role’s setup 100% Coding 100% People/Org Mgmt
17. Understand your own motivation
18. Humble up ASAP and study management as a hard-skill For a long time, I dismissed resources I could learn from as too vague and general I could also appreciate some books and trainings only after having past experience I could relate to
20. Don’t try to figure it out alone Mentoring Coaching Discussion groups all have great ROI
21. Let’s work together on becoming better managers! Thanks! Questions?