Intro

If you’re thinking about ways to progress in your career as an engineer, growing into an engineering leadership role can be a great goal for you!

Especially with the progression of AI → leadership is something that can’t be replaced and therefore engineering leadership roles will always be needed, no matter how fast AI is progressing.

To help you with this, you can follow this full roadmap to break into engineering leadership in 2025.

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

1. Decide your career path
1.1 Grow to Senior Engineer role before considering moving to engineering leadership
1.2 Changing companies vs being promoted within the company to an engineering leadership position
1.3 Which path to choose?
1.4 What particular skills do you need to develop?
2. How to grow toward your first engineering leadership role
2.1 Let your manager know about your goals and aspirations
2.2 Build credibility
🔒 2.3 Start keeping a list of all the wins that you achieve
🔒 2.4 Become the go-to person or considered an expert in a certain engineering domain
🔒 2.5 Learn to manage up well
🔒 2.6 Become a team player and a great engineer to work with
🔒 2.7 Become a business and product-minded engineer
🔒 2.8 Propose an impactful improvement to the codebase and own the implementation
🔒 2.9 Build good relationships inside and outside your engineering team
🔒 2.10 Bonus reads that will help you with getting to your first engineering leadership role
🔒 Last words

Senior Engineer to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role

You can follow this self-paced roadmap or another option for you is to enroll to the course, where we go into a lot more details.

• We go into specific cases from students + have dedicated Q&A time

• We have breakout rooms to talk about specific topics

• We also have a module where we talk about how to thrive in a lead role

This is especially great if you want to dive deeper into every topic and also meet like-minded people + have accountability for learning.

Over 150 students have already attended the course and have reported improvements in their careers + achieved promotions.

The next cohort starts on June 10 and you can still use code EARLYBIRD for a limited-time offer of 25% off or use this link: Senior Engineer to Lead where the code is already applied.

I want to enroll!

Looking forward to seeing some of you there.

Let’s get straight into the roadmap next!

1. Decide your career path

There are 3 main options when it comes to Engineering Leadership and the 3 main routes are:

• Management (Team Lead or Engineering Manager)

• IC (Tech Lead or Staff Engineer)

• Architecture (Software Architect)

I consider these to be starting engineering leadership roles, where people in such roles are expected to be multipliers for others and not primarily contributing by finishing assigned tasks.

1.1 Grow to Senior Engineer role before considering moving to engineering leadership

Before considering growing to any of the paths mentioned above, I highly recommend growing toward Senior Engineer role and developing both depth and breadth.

I recommend becoming an expert in one particular skill and good in a lot of others.

Here is an example of a good skillset with both depth and breadth for a Sr. Frontend Engineer:

1.2 Changing companies vs being promoted within the company to an engineering leadership position

The most common way to get to your first engineering leadership role is to be promoted within the organization.

The reason is: Internal credibility.

Managers normally want to minimize the risk as much as possible when hiring a person for an engineering leadership position. So, when they consider people externally for the role → they will automatically look for someone who has experience in that particular role.

That’s why you have a lot more chances to get to your first engineering leadership role by being promoted internally.

You have been able to showcase your skillset and you’ve built a good reputation for yourself. Your manager knows what you can bring to the table and that you are trustworthy.

So, this is an advantage and will help you a lot to get promoted internally versus interviewing for the role externally.

However, this doesn’t mean that there is no chance for you to get hired to your first engineering leadership role by interviewing.

On the contrary, if you can showcase that you have already been working on the next level just without the title. Or that you can work effectively on the next level, that would definitely help and would increase your chances. So, definitely go for it if that’s the case.

1.3 Which path to choose?

Here is my recommendation on which path may be right for you:

Knowing in which path to grow is the best way to focus on the right set of skills needed to progress to the next step.

Everyone is different, and what may work for one person may not work for the other. It’s important that you play to your strengths.

You can read more here:

What’s next after Senior Engineer? Gregor Ojstersek · Apr 16 Read full story

You’ll find my Engineering Career Path Guide there, which I recommend checking and a template to define your pros and cons list to choose the right path for you.

1.4 What particular skills do you need to develop?

• System Design

• Leadership

• Management (for management path)

• Technical details

• Product/Business

• Communication/Influence

To help you with this, check out my learning tracks and archive + You can find additional 100+ resources to grow in each of these areas below.

100+ resources to become a great engineering leader Gregor Ojstersek · January 14, 2024 Read full story

2. How to grow toward your first engineering leadership role

Now that you have chosen your career path, it’s time to put in actionable steps for you to grow toward your first engineering leadership role.

The focus should be on actions and not just on theory. I’ve particularly written the roadmap in a way that you can start using it in your day-to-day work immediately.

These actions are all applicable to any of the paths you decide to go as mentioned above.

The first thing you should do is to tell your manager about your goals and aspirations.

After that, focus on the things mentioned after. The better you are in all of these things, the better chances you’ll have to grow to your first engineering leadership role.

2.1 Let your manager know about your goals and aspirations

The reason is that if your manager doesn’t know about your goals and where you wish to grow, they won’t be able to put you in the position to showcase the skills needed to grow to that position.

And it’s not just important what you say, but how you say it as well.

We are all human beings and we react much differently when we sense excitement, motivation or drive.

So make sure to do exactly that. Let them know about all of the books that you read, newsletters that you read, courses that you are taking + any other resources from which you are learning.

You can read how to do that in detail here:

How to let your manager know about your goals and aspirations Gregor Ojstersek · July 7, 2024 Read full story

There, you’ll also find a template that will help you define your pitch to share your goals and aspirations with your manager.

2.2 Build credibility

Credibility is a combination of your skills and how people perceive you.

It’s not enough if you just focus on your skills, if you neglect the second part, you won’t come across as a credible individual.

You can be the best in your craft, but it’s also important to showcase that through:

• getting things done (taking ownership, responsibility and being reliable),

• helping others and making others around you better,

• social proof (what others are saying about you).

That’s how you come across as a very credible individual.

You can read how to build credibility in detail here:

How to build credibility in the engineering industry Gregor Ojstersek · May 5, 2024 Read full story

You can also get the Notion Template: Become a credible engineer, where you can define the key points to improve your credibility here: 🎁 Products for paid subscribers.

2.3 Start keeping a list of all the wins that you achieve...