Engineers often ask me how they can grow into management. Here’s how I did it.

Inspiration: Entrepreneurial beginnings

I had always been interested in business. My father and grandfather were my role-models. Some of my fondest memories were visiting their offices as small child. I would dream of one day donning a suit and marching into an office of my own.

My interest in computers developed rapidly into something marketable.
At the age of 12, I began offering my services in PC assembly and repair. My father encouraged me to distribute posters and fliers and solicit clients. My grandfather purchased a technician’s toolkit for me. My mother sent me to obtain the appropriate A+ certification.

I transformed the maid’s room in the back of the family house into a lab. Soon I had regular customers, a side business assembling PC boards, and moderate success assembling and selling new machines.

An entrepreneurial mindset is key. Running a business requires constant effort and resourcefulness, with people skills playing as big a role as technical ability. Everything depends on what is delivered to the customer at the end of the day. Marketing, talking on the phone and managing suppliers were just as important as being able to bring a computer back from the brink. My top mistake was not growing the business further.

Key lesson: Act like a business owner

First industrial application

My father hired me to write the software for automating a textiles factory. In short, we were retrofitting industrial knitting machines to use a software interface, instead of punch cards. It required a lot of perseverance to deliver this application on my own from my bedroom, with only specifications and occasional feedback. This application is still in use today.

I learned that consistent effort is needed to succeed. I had to work even when I didn’t feel like it, because an entire team, not to mention my family, was depending on me. This established a baseline for me on what is possible for a motivated developer to accomplish: a single person can make an entire medium-sized complex application in their bedroom in their spare time, provided they are given clear specs, freedom, focus, and occasional feedback. The biggest mistake I made was not doubling-down by taking a second opportunity to automate an engineering metalworks factory.

Key lesson: Commit and deliver

First taste of leadership

My first genuine experience managing others was in university, where I tutored the C++ course. One of the year-end projects was an application to teach sign language. The professor, a kind man whom I remember fondly, hired the top two student groups, and myself as team lead. The goal was to develop their projects into a viable application for charity.

The project ran over 3 weeks through the summer vacation. We occupied the senior CS lab on Upper campus. The team was excellent – talented students. They would soon launch rapidly successful careers of their own.

I worked alongside the team each day to deliver the complete application on time.

I am most proud that we finished the project. This set a goalpost for me in the future: working with people and code.

But I made many mistakes, too, the biggest of which was my micro-management of the team: monitoring their hours, watching their screens, policing their lunch-breaks, telling them where to sit; meanwhile, they were getting most work on this project done at home. I regret not giving them more space and making the experience more pleasant for them.

Key lesson: Focus on people

Entering the corporate world

I joined a start-up after graduating, but after finding it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, I took a full-time job at Amazon EC2.

I spent the next years honing my craft as a software engineer, pausing my leadership ambitions until I had mastered the job itself. I moved from team to team, learned hardcore networking, virtualisation, Linux sysadmin and data centre management, learned new programming languages and frameworks, how to excel as part of a team, and how to manage myself and my projects.

Only after mastering this learning curve did I have the time and attention to seek leadership opportunities. I takes time to master the core skill-set, understand how the organisation works, and establish enough influence to move important initiatives forward.

Key lesson: Excellent managers are first excellent engineers.

Driving my first major initiative

I saw an opportunity to replace most of our legacy application with simple scripts on a new platform built by a team in the US. All it required was for the different areas of the company to provide suitable APIs, which was already the company’s strategy.

I up-skilled myself on this topic. I pushed to have this work included in the team’s goals. I met extensively with the people providing the platform, asked them for feedback on my code, gave suggestions and highlighted gaps for inclusion on their roadmap. I created hacks to workaround shortcomings and shared these. I sought out other top creators on this platform and met with them to understand their work.

I created proofs-of-concept and demoed these to my team.

I persuaded my manager to send me on a business trip to the US. After a 30 hour flight from the southern tip of Africa, through London and on to West Virginia, I sat with key dependencies, explained the project, demoed what I had, and worked alongside them to integrate their APIs.

I then flew to Seattle, where I spent a week with the platform team, joined their events, and had a huge in-person workshop with the Customer Service team who would be using the tool.

I woke up at 6am and ordered breakfast from room service as soon as it opened. I would work late into the night after work. This helped me to get as much productivity out of the trip as possible: I made sure to solve yesterday’s problems before the following day.

I made sure to bond as much as possible with the entire team: I was graciously invited for Thanksgiving, played Super Smash Bros, experienced Arlington’s night life, went to Korean BBQ at 4am and rapped over Tupac lyrics in the car on the way home. I saw Interstellar at the Pacific Science Centre at 1am before getting ‘breakfast’ at a 24-hour diner at around 3am, then going out the next night to a local bar surrounded by food trucks, where I learned the meaning of ‘Number 13’ beer; flying out the following day exhausted, but deeply satisfied with what I and the team had accomplished.

What I enjoyed most about this project was the rapid pace, the collaboration across teams and timezones, the innovation of new technology, and the opportunity to spearhead something I believed in. I felt a rush similar to that first university project, which I had not felt in a long time. What I learned is that a company will not reward you for “who you are”; it is always up to you to prove your value through actions and results. I had to push this project forward every step of the way.

Key lesson: Leadership is a verb

Second initiative: Building for builders

I moved to a rapidly-growing Fintech start-up called Jumo. Here I implemented a general framework for creating financial products e.g. savings, loans. My vision was that all the business rules for a product would exist side-by-side in brief file, all components would be reusable, all operations would be high-level, and that this would replace the existing implementation of the product, while enabling the rapid development of new products.

I dove into the topic. The team of 5 engineers grew to 15 across 3 teams. I worked on it late into the night, swarming on it with my colleagues throughout the day, highlighting gaps, prioritising deliverables, fanning work across teams, and demoing the latest developments from the previous day. The pace of progress was furious. We had regular demos to business stakeholder, aligned with the product owners, defined how each team could contribute, and tried to find the ‘right’ level of engineering to achieve the goal. The sproject took about a month.

This was my first experience in creating a framework for engineers to build on. I enjoyed the energy, the innovation and the thrill of a large team working towards a common goal. Most of my learnings here were around my interactions with my colleagues. I could have clarified my role as well as the roles of my senior colleagues better, giving them all an opportunity to lead different aspects of the project.

Key lesson: Give the team what they need to succeed

Success at last, abroad

I then moved abroad to join Booking.com. After onboarding on a strong team, I moved to a second team which faced challenges, for example, in terms of KPIs, purpose, and delivery. I raised these items first within the team itself, then with my manager, who began to ask me my take on topics like: how is the team, and the data to support that; what the team could focus on, and why; and how the team was doing in terms of people and operationally.

Soon after, my manager asked me to attend department meetings to review team status. When I was able to politely but confidently present my view and challenge the status quo, providing the data behind my perspective, I felt my manager’s trust in my ability to represent my team grow.

Within a few months, my manager asked me if I ever considered being a team lead. I was surprised since I was at the company for a relatively short time, and did not express any desire for promotion, but I was flattered and delighted to take on the opportunity.

I give my manager an enormous amount of kudos for re-igniting this spark within me and encouraging me to step up beyond my comfort zone.

I felt like I was finally being acknowledged.

Conclusion

This, in short, is the story of how I moved from being an engineer to an engineering manager at a market-leading Fortune 500 company.

Over the years, the company formally raised the bar for the team lead position to transform it to Engineering manager; by that stage, I was already promoted again to senior management level.

This chapter of the story ended with my managing a team of 6 talented engineers myself. I hope that this brief, anecdotal essay may help some brilliant future leader stick it out just a bit longer to reach their potential.

I learned many things during this time, but chief among them were to trust my gut, to maintain high standards, to dive into difficult conversations, and to persist. I also feel that the international market and expanding company simply provided more opportunity for me to step up.

Key lesson: Luck is where opportunity meets preparedness.

Summary and takeaways

Here is my advice for aspiring engineering managers:

• Act like a business owner. Think big picture. Use all of your resources and agency. Focus on the customer. Engineering is your specialty, not your bounding box.
• Commit and deliver. Stay true to word and keep your promises. Everyone has good days and bad. Consistent effort will pay off in the long run. Discipline is more important than motivation.
• Excellent managers are first excellent engineers. Achieving a top percentile level of proficiency takes time and hard work. There are no shortcuts.
• Leadership is a verb. We are as we do. There are many actions of leadership one can take without ever having an official title of recognition or permission from anyone.
• Give the team what they need to succeed. Whether you are training them, aligning them, helping them choose more meaningful goals, or removing noise, the leader must identify and serve the biggest needs of their team to be successful.
• Luck is where opportunity meets preparedness. Maximise your readiness, then maximise your opportunity surface area. It may be that your current environment can’t sustain your future growth.
• Bonus: Have a long term vision and plan for your career with specific goals. Structure will help guide you when times are tough and remind you what you are working towards. Work on it with your manager, coach, spouse or mentor.