From IC to Manager: Overcome the Challenges
Changing from an individual contributor, a.k.a IC to manager is one of the difficult transitions.
There are many transitions, like the first job, growing to a senior engineer — each transition has its challenges, so why is it considered a hard transition? Let’s take a look.
From IC to manager
The responsibility shifts from building the product to building the team that builds the product.
Very often, the strongest engineer is transitioned into management and they receive no training and support. The first-time manager is thrown into the water without learning to swim.
There are additional skills to acquire and hone, such as project management, strategic planning, effective communication and conflict resolution.
Most are not born managers. It takes time to learn and improve, and luckily it’s not some mysterious art, but rather a craft that can be mastered with actionable guidance from books, podcasts, coaches, peers, meetups and trial and error.
1. Long feedback loop
As junior IC, we’re used to being given a task with detailed instructions on how to accomplish it.
As we gain experience and develop in our carer, we receive tasks, which we ideate, implement, test and release with varying levels of support from others. We deal with increasingly more complicated systems and more ambiguity, but within days we usually know whether the system behaves as we intended.
In all these cases, “the truth is in the code” and we have a rather short feedback loop — compiling either passes or fails, tests are red or green, the app loads or crashes, the peers give immediate feedback during pairing or a bit later in code review and the metrics quickly tell the story.
The next customer call is just days away, so we get meaningful feedback from them quickly.
As a manager, apart from the technical work, there are rarely discrete tasks. The focus of the job is no longer delivering tasks that have a clear and immediate state of success or failure. The focus is to continuously make sure that the team is having results and retention via 1:1s, giving feedback, coaching, delegating, setting psychological safety and more. These take weeks and months in most cases. And any change to the team’s structure might have a significant impact.
In short, as the feedback loop is so much longer, it’s hard to see the results and to know whether we’re doing well and must persevere or rather change course.
How to mitigate
Have weekly 1:1s to build trust and rapport, so you understand how people feel, how to help them improve and what’s keeping them back.
Give timely feedback, positive and negative.
Track valuable metrics such as DORA and SPACE.
2. What is success in this company?
While the success of the technical work is usually clear and the expected business outcome is often outlined in OKRs or other goals setting systems, the managerial part is often absent or very vague, even when the company has official “ leadership principles” like amazon, if they are not lived in the day-to-day.
There are so many different companies, industries, company stages, cultures… How do you know what to aim for?
Success could mean either hiring for rapid growth, retaining people, reducing costs, removing tech debt, delivering features by deadlines, keeping it slow and safe, growing the people, building the right things, achieving OKRs, innovating or many more.
How to mitigate
Check whether there are specific guidelines, career ladder definitions and metrics already in place.
Note down what’s important to upper management, observe the managers that are considered high performers — what distinguishes them?
What behaviors are people praised for?
3. What is success for my manager?
Managers often don’t proactively and clearly communicate all the important goals, what metrics or vision they want us to pursue and it’s hard to navigate.
Asking directly is risky, as it implies that the manager either knows but didn’t share, or embarrasses them as they don’t know the answer either.
How to mitigate
Come up with your own goals and ideas and ask your manager for feedback.
This is much more likely to succeed than asking for them or pursuing goals the manager doesn’t consider valuable.
4. Complex system
Being responsible for the performance of a system with multiple technical and human variables is not only complicated, it’s also complex:
In a simple system, the cause and effect are very easy to reason about and influence.
In a complicated system, like a watch, it takes some effort to understand, but in the end is deterministic and cause and effect become clear.
In a complex system, cause and effect are hard to see and they may change with time, such as traffic in the city.
There are the team members, stakeholders, communication patterns, optimization for the short term or the long run, inevitable technological and business changes as well as personal, structural and incentives changes.
How to continuously ensure performance, i.e. the results and retention, in such a system, where debugging problems and taking advantage of opportunities is so elusive?
How to mitigate
Obtain product mastery — deeply understand the product, the users, the use cases and the business model.
Understand the business goals, the incentives of the peers and stakeholders, get to know your direct reports very well. Repeat the goals and continuously set expectations. Learn about situational management to handle unexpected events (they actually are expected, you’re not the first one in any given situation).
Make sure to build relationships and get information flowing not only from your manager, so you can prepare and react more quickly to changes.
Keep the finger on the pulse — learn what’s about to come regarding new technology, working methodologies, your industry and the global economy.
5. Low-level details and big-picture dichotomy
Managers are both in the trenches, at the lowest level of details of engineering, operations, techniques, languages, frameworks, technologies and also in the bigger picture, the team’s strategy, vision, goals, and must speak the business and stakeholders’ language, whether with other product-engineering teams, product people, business experts, marketing, sales or legal.
Especially during economic downturns, they are expected to be much more hands-on and “do more with less”, while maintaining the same level of business communication and outcome.
How to mitigate
Experiment and design your ideal time distribution, and make sure to have everything on your calendar, so it’s not forgotten. Things will definitely change, and then you’ll update the calendar accordingly. Make sure to schedule time to reflect and think about strategy and other important topics. Don’t let your time be solely dictated by others.
By coaching the team members and delegating to them, they’d benefit from higher performance, more autonomy and decision-making. Then you could be less in every detail and still maintain a good knowledge of what’s happening in the team.
Having good relationships with the stakeholders will help to understand their needs and communicate what you can and cannot do.
