The Path to Managing Managers
👋 Hi, this is Ryan with another edition of my newsletter about software engineering and career growth. Thanks to your support, we hit 101k readers this week! Today’s post is from James Stanier who is an engineering director at Shopify. He’s written two books on engineering management (book1, book2), and I’ve found a lot of his writing online helpful for understanding manager career growth. Today, he’s sharing about the path to managing managers, which is interesting since career growth and strategy for managers is very different from early IC career growth: For more from James, I recommend you follow him on LinkedIn or subscribe to his newsletter. He writes high-quality posts on engineering management. Here’s James: How do you end up being one of those people that manages managers? No doubt you’ve seen Director of…, Head of…, and VP roles advertised externally, especially at large software companies. However, often there’s a Catch-22 situation that you’ll face: they’re typically looking for people who have had experience doing it before. Or even if they say that they aren’t, what chance will you have in the recruitment process if you’re up against others who’ve been there and done that? Now, of course, you might get lucky. But maybe there are ways of preparing to make yourself even more lucky. Let’s think about preparing yourself for the leap to managing managers. I believe that you stand the most chance of being able to make the next progression step if you find yourself at the union of a majority of the following characteristics and situations:
Now, of course, it is entirely plausible that you may apply cold for a Director of Engineering role as an external applicant while currently being an Engineering Manager. That’s what I meant by getting lucky above. Quite often more senior engineering management positions are either headhunted or promoted from within. But why is this?
These are all opportunities you can more likely seize if you make sure you’re already working for an ambitious, high growth company and are doing a stellar job of running a team. This is no small feat in itself, mind you. Start-ups, or smaller high growth companies in general, are great for giving yourself this opportunity, especially ones that have just received a new venture capital investment. An injection of money means an injection of people, which creates more opportunities for leading them as the org chart adapts. I advocated strongly for the managerial opportunities that high-growth start-ups can offer you in the penultimate chapter of my book. After all, how do you reckon many CTOs became CTOs for the first time? So where am I going with this? To use the cheesiest quote, you’ve gotta skate where the puck is going. (Thanks Wayne.) Yes, you can keep an eye on external adverts, apply to anything and everything, and hope you land the job. However, depending on where you currently work, it may be more fruitful to change your role sooner at your current level – which is often easier – to stand more of a chance of upward growth over time. There are parallels here with the early stages of an individual contributor’s career. It’s often hard to land that first job because the applicant has yet to prove themselves. However, once they’ve stuck around for a few years and have gained experience by shipping lots of code, they find themselves having to bat the recruiters away. The same thing is true about progressing further up the management track. Getting your first management role is tough, but you only have to do it once to prove you can do it again. The same is true about the next step of managing managers. People often grow from within by being excellent performers and working their way upwards. If you’re looking to grow from managing individual contributors to managing managers, think about the following points.
What’s your current story? Does it feel like you’re ready for the next step? Have you already been working at the level of your next promotion? Until the next one, good luck! |
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