You’ve Been Promoted to Technical Manager, Now What?
By: Paul Chiu
Tags: Management, Software Development, Engineering Mangement, Programming, Software

What kind of manager can you be?

In the book Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio writes,

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots¹.

Even if you have a concrete idea of what kind of manager you want to be, that model may not be the right fit for your organisation. As George Box wrote: “All models are wrong but some are useful.”² In this section I will present some considerations that should help you discover blind spots you have about working effectively in your organisation and decide whether your model of a manager is useful for your organisation.

Blind spots

Depending on maturity of your organisation, expectations of managers may or may not be clearly defined. The key blind spot I see in people moving from engineering to management is that your colleagues are no longer your team members, but other technology managers. Understanding the culture, expectations, and obligations at that level is key to understanding what kind of manager you can be.

For organisations that have leadership or management programmes, expectations concerning your conduct, way of working, reporting lines, etc. should be reasonably clear. The blind spot to uncover here is understanding where the organisation does not practice what they preach. This can occur when the company is growing too fast for the training programmes to keep up, or when the programme presents an idealised view that doesn’t fit reality.

Regardless of whether the organisation have clear expectations set for you, it’s up to you to discover what they are for yourself. This may involve talking to your manager about role expectations, specifically:

What does success look like to them?

What deliverable are they expecting from you?

Who are the people you need to know, talk to, and satisfy?

How do you get process changes, budgets, training, new software, etc. approved?

In addition to talking to your manager(s), you should also talk to your team about:

What are they struggling with?

What’s something they have had in another workplace that they would like to see at your organisation?

In doing all this discovery work, you should have a good idea of what everyone else expects you to be. These expectations are both a constraint and an opportunity. That is, it is something for you to live up to and exceed. Again, these expectations evolve over time, part of the job is continuing to check in with your manager(s) and your team so you clearly understand expectations and challenges on both sides of your job.

The model manager

In becoming a technical manager, you are moving from a world of explicit systems defined in code and data to a world of informal processes and lossy communications. While asking what people expect is important, it’s also of great value to see what the organisation values. The model manager is the manager that is highly visible in the organisation, either for their achievements as acknowledged by senior management, or for their actions as recognised by general staff.

By looking around, you should see that your management colleagues are even more varied than colleagues you had from your technical team, as they may come from business, management, finance, operations, HR, or any background relevant to your organisation’s industry. If you can identify these model managers, you can understand what is valued and tolerated by the organisation. Culture fit is a real thing, in addition to knowing what you should do, you also need to figure out where the lines are. It should be noted that not all rules are applied the same way to all people, and you need to pick and choose when you want to push boundaries carefully.