Intro

I wish you an amazing start of the new year and may 2025 be the best year for you!

With every start of the new year, there come new opportunities and new learning chances. Setting up goals is important, but even more important is to follow through what you have set up for yourself.

Sometimes "just DO it" attitude works best!

Is there a new programming language you wish to learn? Go for it.
Is there a new framework or a new concept you wish to try? Go for it.
Are you thinking about a side project? Go for it.

Become comfortable with being uncomfortable - that's where the magic happens.

To help you with this, I am sharing my view on what particular things I recommend to focus on in 2025 as an engineering leader to:
- maximize your impact in your organization and your team,
- level up in your career,
- future-proof and generate more opportunities for yourself.

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

- Engineering leaders need to be good at many things
- Wearing multiple hats will expand further in 2025 and beyond
- Here is why I believe so
🔒 This is what you should do in order to thrive in 2025 and beyond
🔒 Notion Template: Become a credible engineer
🔒 Focus on building up your credibility
🔒 Leadership skills will always be highly worth
🔒 Get better at being product/business-minded
🔒 Leverage AI in your work
🔒 Start writing online if you haven’t already
🔒 Last words

Resources mentioned in the article:

• How to build credibility in the engineering industry (paid article)

• Leadership in 60 seconds

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

• How to Lead When You're Not in Charge

• A good engineer thinks like a product manager (paid article)

• LinkedIn guide for engineers and managers (paid article)

• How to start, grow and monetize your engineering newsletter (paid article)

Let’s go straight into it.

Engineering leaders need to be good at many things

Diversity of responsibilities is huge and countless different problems need to be solved in any organization.

From relationships, alignments and all the way to technical challenges and handling incidents. As a manager myself, I sometimes feel a bit like a therapist as well.

We need to wear many different hats in order to be successful in our roles and I don’t see this changing for the less, but changing for the more.

In 2025 and beyond, my prediction is that wearing multiple hats will just expand further.

Wearing multiple hats will expand further in 2025 and beyond

I believe it will become more and more common for middle managers e.g. (Sr.) Engineering Managers to be expected to take on Staff Engineer roles if needed and Staff+ Engineers be able to take on manager hats if needed.

The same goes for Architects as well → taking on Staff Engineer role or manager role if needed. I see the trend moving more and more in this direction.

And also a similar trend for PMs and Engineers. The role “Product Engineer” is getting more and more popular and being product/business-minded is just going to be more and more important for all engineering roles.

Here is why I believe so

We’ve seen how Elon Musk has laid off 80% of the workforce of X and we’ve also seen multiple companies doing layoffs → companies of all sizes, from big tech all the way to startups.

And when there are fewer people in the company, it’s natural that more is expected from existing people.

Also recently, Amazon announced the initiative to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%. And when one of the big tech companies does something, a lot of other companies seem to do a similar thing as well.

It has become a repetitive trend now.

And last, but not least → Gen AI is progressing further. The tools for development will just become more sophisticated and development will become easier.

The engineering roles (titles) in the future will be more blurred as time goes on and being good at many things will not be a nice-to-have, but a must-have.

This is what you should do to thrive in 2025 and beyond...