Intro

I hope you are having a good start to the New Year, 2026, and I wish you much success throughout the rest of the year as well.

To help you have an amazing 2026 and achieve your professional goals, today’s article will definitely help you with that.

In today’s article, we are going through the most important things that I believe will make you a great engineering leader in 2026 and beyond. I am doing a commentary of my 2025 predictions, and then we are going into detailed insights of my top tips for 2026.

This is definitely a must-read article for all the engineering leaders who wish to be successful in their roles.

This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:

- Everything That I Mentioned In the 2025 Guide Holds True Today
- Engineering leaders need to be good at many things + wearing multiple hats will expand further
- Focus on building up your credibility
- Leadership skills will always be highly worth
- Get better at being product/business-minded
🔒 This is What You Should Do to Thrive in 2026 and Beyond
🔒 Make sure to lead in an AI-native world
🔒 Build your network outside of your company
🔒 Become better at communication and/or tech skills
🔒 With tools for development getting better, building the right things is more important than ever
🔒 Invest in your own sustainability
🔒 Last words

Let’s start!

Everything That I Mentioned In the 2025 Guide Holds True Today

If you haven’t read the 2025 guide on becoming a great engineering leader, I definitely recommend doing so:

Become a Great Engineering Leader in 2025 Gregor Ojstersek · January 1, 2025 Read full story

To do a recap of all the main things I mentioned in the article, here is my commentary on them and how things have impacted specific parts in 2025.

Engineering leaders need to be good at many things + wearing multiple hats will expand further

That has shown to be true as there have been many examples of engineering leaders increasing the number of hats they need to wear.

I’ve heard of many engineering leaders wearing the manager hat as well as the Team Lead and Tech Lead hats at the same time, which makes a Staff Engineer also the manager of the team or the manager, a Staff Engineer of the team.

That’s also one of the reasons why I recommend that engineering leaders stay technical, as roles like Team Lead, Engineering Manager, Architect, Tech Lead, Staff Engineer are just going to get closer together, and it’s important that you keep your technical chops at a good level.

While at the same time, good people skills are more important than ever. The best engineering leaders, and the most sought-after, are the ones who have extraordinary good people skills combined with a good understanding of technical details.

This exact scenario has also come up in the Q&A part of my recent talk at the TechLead conference in London. You can check it out here (from 31:30):

The question asked was:

“I am an iOS staff engineer turned EM, leading a cross-functional team, it’s not easy to act as an EM and a staff for backend, frontend and mobile all at same time. How to deal with title blur?”

My answer to the question was the following:

“You need to pick your battles, you can’t be the best manager and also the best engineer on the team as well. You need to find people that you can trust inside your team, who can take more of the ownership of certain parts.

You won’t be able to delegate the managerial responsibilities, but you can find people who can take more ownership of different domains and become tech leads for the iOS part, frontend part, and the backend part. You can’t be an expert in all of these technologies as well.”

Focus on building up your credibility

This has been my next piece of advice, and yes, it’s more important than ever. We’ve seen the decrease in entry-level tech roles, and I believe that in 2026, we’ll just see even more of a decrease in the entry-level roles, that’s my feeling based on having different conversations with many people across the tech industry.

It’s more important than ever to increase your credibility as much as you can, because the more credible you are, the more opportunities you’ll have. It’s not just your skills that you need to focus on, but also making sure that people perceive you in a good way, both play an equal part.

The roles and opportunities have kind of stabilized, but still, they are nowhere near the level of what they used to be in the past, as you can see from this picture:

I’ve also shared my advice on what I would do if I would be looking for a new engineering / engineering leadership role in this article:

My Advice For Engineers and Engineering Leaders to Get a New Role Faster Gregor Ojstersek · December 7, 2025 Read full story

I would particularly focus on making it impossible for the hiring manager to ignore me. As we’ve seen from different examples, just sending a CV and applying to the role in most cases gets ignored these days.

Leadership skills will always be highly worth

This was also one of the advices in the 2025 article, and it’s very true and what I highly recommend to focus on.

As tools for development are getting better and better, and things are becoming more and more robotic around us, skills that gain a lot more value are human-related skills, and that makes leadership skills more important than ever.

As we’ve seen from an example above → A Staff Engineer was made to be also a manager of the team, which means they need a good grasp of leadership skills and managerial responsibilities quickly in order to do well in the role.

And there are many more examples of engineers being asked to be a lot more involved in owning and leading their work, not just doing things based on the requirements.

As you know, the hardest part of building software is not coding itself, it’s making clear requirements that are exactly aligned with what the users actually need.

So, if you make clear requirements and create a prompt in the right way → AI Agents these days are able to output quite good quality code. And with good quality input (context + prompt), you can get good output.

I’ve seen, especially in startups and mid-size companies, where each of the engineers is acting as a tech lead and is owning their own projects, making decisions, and also communicating the impact and outcomes of it.

I really believe that the tech lead role is one of the most desirable roles in tech and is just going to continue to be so. The reason is a good mix of technical and people-related skills, which includes:

• common sense and pragmatism,

• good communication and leadership,

• being a multiplier for others and making everyone around them better.

I’ve noted this down in a recent LinkedIn post:

Get better at being product/business-minded

This has become increasingly important as predicted and has shown to be more and more important + the importance will keep increasing in 2026 and beyond as well.

We’ve seen both engineers and engineering leaders a lot closer to: what, why, and when, and not only the how. That’s especially the case when it comes to building AI products or building an AI strategy.

Knowing how to build AI products can be the difference between building it in 3 days or in 300 days. And both engineers and engineering leaders know that well.

Miqdad Jaffer, Product Lead at OpenAI, has mentioned that the overall ownership when it comes to building AI products has come a lot closer to engineering, and as an engineering leader, it’s crucial that you build the necessary strategic skills, so you can answer “what”, “when”, and “why” as well.

The picture below is also a great representation of how important it is for engineers and engineering leaders to get better at business and product skills. What used to be co-owned by many different departments is primarily being owned by engineering now.

Here is what Miqdad recommends:

Learn more in this article:

OpenAI's Product Leader Reveals: AI Product Strategy for Engineering Leaders Gregor Ojstersek and Miqdad Jaffer · August 27, 2025 Read full story

Now, let’s go to my specific tips on what you should do to be successful in 2026 and beyond.

This is What You Should Do to Thrive in 2026 and Beyond...