The trap of being promoted from within

Two weeks ago, I stepped into a new role as Engineering Zone Lead over the Workflow Zone at Zapier. In less Zapier-specific terms, I’m now leading a broader division of the company after spending the past year managing one piece of it. The first thing I did was start booking meet & greets.

Which sounds very normal, except these aren’t really “nice to meet you, here’s who I am” conversations. I’m not walking in brand new. I’ve been managing part of this zone for over a year, so I already know a good chunk of the people, the backlog, the projects, the recurring arguments, and the things that have been stuck in place for longer than they probably should be. I have context. But that’s actually the problem.

The danger of being promoted from within is that it feels like you already know what’s going on. You’ve sat in the meetings, watched decisions get made, and felt the friction firsthand. You know which things have made you quietly mutter under your breath after a meeting ends. Hypothetically.

So the easy move would be to take the promotion, open the list of things I’ve been mentally collecting for the past year, and start acting on it. But that list is not the truth. It’s my truth, from the seat I was sitting in.

I knew my view was partial. The risk was letting that partial view feel complete just because I’d been looking at it for a long time.

The classic first 90 days advice usually assumes you’re walking into unfamiliar territory. Learn the people. Learn the culture. Listen before you lead. Don’t start changing things before you understand why they exist. It’s good advice, but it's not quite as clear-cut when you’re promoted from within.

When you’re already inside the organization, you don’t feel unfamiliar. You know the people. You know how planning works. You know where the weird handoffs are, which projects have been stuck, and which decisions somehow keep reappearing like they’re trapped in four different versions of a Google Doc, all with unresolved comments.

That context is useful. It’s also exactly what makes the transition tricky.

But I don’t think being internal means you get to skip the listening part. I think it makes the listening part harder. You’re not trying to learn from scratch; you’re trying to separate what you actually know from what you’ve assumed for long enough that it started feeling like knowledge. It's a completely different exercise.

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Over the past year, I built a very specific list of opinions: pain points I felt firsthand, gaps I noticed from my angle, and problems I assumed others saw the same way because, to me, they were obvious. But everyone else has been building their own list too.

The engineers have one list. PMs have another. Other managers have another. Some of those lists will overlap with mine. Some won’t. And I’m sure there are at least a few things on someone else’s list where I’m part of the problem, because that is generally how the universe likes to keep managers humble.

So that’s what these conversations are for.

For people I haven’t met yet, these conversations are partly introductions. They may have seen my name in docs or we may have been in the same meeting, but that’s not the same thing as knowing me or trusting me. And if I want honest input on what feels broken, uncomfortable, or frustrating, I can’t treat the conversation like an interrogation with a calendar invite. Nothing says "oh no" quite like getting a random no-context 1:1 request from your new skip-level manager, so part of the work is making sure these conversations feel like conversations.

Before each conversation, I’ve been writing down the assumptions I’m walking in with. Not in a formal, color-coded, "please admire my leadership operating system" kind of way. More like: what am I already expecting this person to say (if anything), and what would surprise me if they said something different?

That little step has been more useful than I expected, mostly because it forces me to admit I am walking in with assumptions at all. Some of them are probably right. Some are probably half-right. Some are probably wrong in ways I won’t enjoy discovering. But I’d rather find that out now than six months from now after I’ve made a bunch of decisions based on a picture I only saw one corner of.

One piece of advice I got early on when joining Zapier was to choose my battles, which is one of those pieces of advice that is both very obvious and deeply irritating because it is correct. There are a million things that could use attention in a zone this size. Process things. Technical things. Communication things. Ownership things. The weird category of "everyone knows this is broken but no one has decided who owns fixing it," which is somehow both common and exhausting.

If I’m not careful, I could turn the first few weeks into a giant collection exercise and come out the other side with a beautiful, impossible list of everything that needs work. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s not the job.

The job is figuring out which problems are actually mine to solve, which ones belong somewhere else, and which ones matter enough that I should spend real political capital on them. That’s the part you can’t figure out from your own notes app full of grievances.

And the awkward thing is that the listening tour happens while the job is already happening. The work doesn’t pause so I can go have a thoughtful transition period. Decisions still need to get made. Teams still need direction. People still need answers. Things still need to ship.

So I’m trying to hold both at once: act on the things that are obvious enough to move on now, and resist the urge to over-act on the bigger things until I have a fuller picture.

That second part is harder.

I’ve led an engineering org before, so I’m not sitting here wondering whether I know how to do the work. But I also know enough to know that experience can be a little dangerous when you let it turn into autopilot.

Every company has its own weird quirks. Things that worked beautifully in one place will faceplant somewhere else. A pattern you learned in one org might help you move faster in the next, or it might make you miss the thing that’s actually different.

So the pressure I feel isn’t “can I do this job?” It’s more like: can I slow myself down enough to not just reach for the moves that have worked for me before? Because I do have instincts here. I have opinions. I have a decent sense of where I think the pain is. But “decent sense” isn’t the same thing as “go build an entire plan around it.”

I’m only two weeks in. My calendar is full of conversations over the next few weeks, and my list of things I thought I understood is getting messier, not cleaner. Which is inconvenient, but probably the point.