The Modern Leader
The leap from individual contributor to engineering manager is one of the hardest moves you’ll make in your career.
It’s not just a new title. It’s a fundamentally different job. The habits that made you successful as an engineer don’t always translate—and sometimes they work against you.
Emma and I unpacked this in our latest Ladybug episode. Here are the highlights.
What changes when you move to management
As an IC, your success is shipping code. It’s tactical, measurable, and personal.
As an EM, your success is enabling others to ship. That means your calendar fills with one-on-ones, planning meetings, peer syncs, and leadership updates. You’re judged on how your team delivers—not on your personal commits.
The delegation trap
Delegation sounds easy. In practice, it’s brutal.
You’ll want to tell your team how to do things. You’ll want to fix mistakes before they happen. You’ll want the work done “your way.”
But that’s not the job anymore. Your role is to set direction, give context, and then step back. People will approach problems differently than you. They’ll make mistakes. That’s how they grow.
I explained it this way on the podcast:
“They often will do it a different way than you. And it can be very challenging to say, here’s the project scope—do the thing instead of here’s the project scope, here’s how to do it, now do the thing.”
The hardest part is biting your tongue and letting it happen.
Feedback and conflict are part of the job
Most of us aren’t trained for feedback or conflict. But as a manager, you can’t avoid them.
Conflict isn’t always toxic. It’s often just:
- Which tech stack should we use?
- Which project takes priority?
- Who owns this decision?
Your job is to surface those disagreements and guide the team through them. Healthy conflict creates better outcomes. Avoidance kills progress.
Redefining success
As an IC, success was commits and problem-solving.
As an EM, it’s:
- Is your team delivering on time and with quality?
- Are they growing in their careers?
- Do they feel safe and supported?
- Are you representing your org well to peers and leadership?
Emma joked on the podcast:
“I try to get rid of all of my work… to other people.”
It was tongue-in-cheek, but it captured the point: your value is no longer in how much you do, but in how well you enable others to deliver.
What to read
📚 The Manager’s Path – Camille Fournier’s practical roadmap from IC to EM to manager-of-managers.
📚 LeadDev – excellent talks and articles on the realities of engineering management.
Try this
Think about the last project you worked on. Did you define how the work should be done, or did you give your team the context and let them figure it out?
If you’re still prescribing the “how,” you’re slipping back into IC mode. Empowerment is the metric now.
Listen to the full episode: Transition from IC to EM