" Part of being a good manager is figuring out how to be managed."

Intro

Having an aim in your career is a must in my opinion. At my company, we have a clear career ladder that helps you understand what you need to get promoted.

I am very glad that I get constant support from my team lead, mentor, and other people in senior leadership roles that help me to achieve these things. Having this support drives me crazy to learn new stuff and approach processes differently each day.

Thank you for that :)

It was told by multiple people that I need to prepare my leadership and management skills a long time before I get to the actual position. A book was recommended called "The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change" by Camille Fournier.

This book covers a lot, from preparing for a manager position to becoming a senior manager. I focused the most on the first part, which should help me understand what one can face in such a position the first time.

Here are some highlights that I made which might help if you are looking towards becoming a tech lead or manager yourself one day.

Feedback

It is inevitable to screw up in your work in some fashion. A good manager will always let you know quickly that you did it. The sooner you get feedback about your bad habits, the easier it is to fix them.

Feedback is a crucial part of team success. Great managers will always notice, even little things you're doing in your daily work, and will recognize you for it. Doing it publicly is even better as it shows everyone how valuable you are. Positive reinforcement is a great way to handle teams.

It is great when managers are capable of recognizing things that you should learn and assigning you work that would help you grow. As you become more and more senior the amount of personal feedback you get is likely to decrease.

Asking for advice or feedback is always a good way to show that you respect and trust others.

Required skills for tech lead

• Being a good communicator
• Writing clear documents
• Giving presentations without melting down
• Being able to talk to people in different teams and different roles and explain what is going on
• Being good at prioritizing
• Being eager to push work forward and deciding what to do next
• Being willing to pick up the pieces and do what needs to be done to make progress
• Being pragmatic

Being a tech lead

In the process of being a tech lead, you have to act as a software developer, a systems architect, a business analyst, and a team leader who knows when to do something single-handedly, and when to delegate the work to others.

The tech lead is expected to make sure the team fully understands the project requirements, the work that is planned for them, and whether the team is effective and performing well, all without necessarily having any management responsibilities and usually without any specific training.

Project management is the act of breaking a project or a complex end goal down into small pieces, putting those pieces in the most effective order they should be done, and identifying which pieces can be done in parallel and which must be done in sequence and attempting to figure out the unknowns of a project that may slow it down.

It's almost impossible to lead projects well when you don't understand the architecture you're changing.

Successful leaders write well, they read carefully, and they can get up in front of a group and speak.

Write design documents and get feedback on them from better writers. Write blog posts for your tech blog or your personal blog. Speak in team meetings, and at meetups and get practice standing up in front of the audience. Don't forget to listen during all of this communication. Give others a chance to speak and listen to what they are saying. Practice repeating things back to people to ensure you understand them. If you are not a good note to take, you may need to become one.

Ask your managers what they expect from the tech lead.

You need to stay in the code so you would not risk making yourself technically obsolete too early in your career. It is hard to make up for the lost time when you stop coding, if you do it too early in your career you may never achieve sufficient technical savvy to get beyond the role of middle management.

Conclusion

The most important lesson is that you have to be able to manage yourself if you want o to be good at managing others. The more time you spend understanding yourself, the way you react, the things that inspire you, and the things that drive you crazy, the better off you will be.

Source: The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change Book by Camille Fournier