If you haven’t already, read the first article in the series, which aims to help answer the question of whether to become a manager. Assuming you have some conviction in this being a potential path for you, let’s now tackle the more tactical question of how one might transition to management.

There are essentially three paths you can take.

• Start a company
• Join an early stage company
• Transition yourself to the management track in your current company

While it’s possible to join a company in a management role without having prior management experience, it’s not a common path. And you can also get lucky – work for a hypergrowth company that has more people to manage than skilled managers, fall under the wings of a particularly caring manager, become a manager as a result of company restructuring, etc. – but the above three are best paths if you desire some agency over the process.

Start a company

When you start a company, you get to shape your role. Management may end up being your primary role, or a side project, or something in between (e.g. an honorary responsibility). Needless to say, if your goal is to try your hand at management, starting a company is a very high-commitment and high-burden choice. It also most likely detracts from the twenty hats you are actually supposed to be wearing as a co-founder, so it may actually not be the best thing for the company.

Moreover, the freedom to shape your role may end up being a handicap. You will need to find a good mentor (if you report to your co-founder, it’s doubtful that person will have sufficient time or ability for coaching), and it’s likely that your situation will be bespoke and thus difficult to generalize into learning you can pick up from others. As a result, you will likely end up doing a combination of learning on the job, reinventing the wheel, and coming up with your own version of management that doesn’t necessarily translate into an equivalent role in another company.

All in all, I wouldn’t recommend this as the path to become a good manager. But if you already are predisposed to entrepreneurship, on the margin this may give you an opportunity you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Join an early stage company

Another option is to join a company that already has a “team”. You likely wouldn’t be hired as a manager, but the vast number of hats that need to be worn (a number of them management-like) and the ability to shape your role as an early employee could be attractive.

A good metaphor to consider is a young, newly-formed Earth. The surface is extremely hot and malleable; geological features don’t exist yet (but will form eventually). The chaos will eventually turn into patterns and structure. For now, you can find an early prototype of pretty much any ultimate form.

Likewise, if you join an early stage company, you will play many roles and will find it easier to shift into a configuration that might become a proper management job in the future. At first, management doesn’t seem that meaningful or substantial – everyone is in the same boat, the early employees should all be relatively self-managing, and the company needs to prioritize IC work over management. Later, the need for managers becomes more clear – usually when the need to coordinate the team’s actions and represent the team in front of others become important objectives. As the team grows, the team-building responsibilities kick in: creating team coherence, getting new hires onboarded, dealing with people issues. It’s important to note that for a while this will not be a pure management role, which may be fine if you like the challenge of an ever-shifting job description.

Granted, this is a more natural (and not unusual) way to transition into management. As an early stage employee, you will likely have amassed enough experiences to hone your management intuitions. However, just like when starting a company, you should make sure you want to take on an early stage gig. If it’s not a fit for you, no amount of exposure and opportunities to take on management will be worth it, and your learnings will be limited.

Some of the downsides of managing as a founder also apply. For example, it is likely you will not be managed by someone who can teach you the tricks of the management trade. That’s where being more intentional may be of help – for example, you are more likely to be successful seeking out a mentor, by connecting to the board members or investors in the company, who want the company to succeed and are more accessible than they would be at a larger-stage company. Inside the startup, too, you will have more access; try to seek mentorship from someone who strikes you as a good manager even if that person is not in Engineering. Finally, you may be able to nudge the company to hire a peer who is more experienced than you. As you shadow the person and get their advice, you may be able to offer something in return – the context you’ve built up so far, or your abilities to tackle an early stage environment (such as the ability to deal with ambiguity or showing a bias for action).

Transition to a management track

The most common way people become managers is through a transition – sometimes accidental, other times very intentional – from their current IC role. If you are thinking about becoming a manager, you are most likely an IC right now and you may not want to make a major shift into an early stage company – in such a case, this is the path for you.

To be candid, the journey to management starts when you choose the company where you hope to switch tracks. While I acknowledge that it is most likely too late in most cases (since you’re already working there and would ideally not like to switch jobs), it is possible that you’re on the precipice of selecting a new job and you would like to maximize the chances of becoming a manager there. If so, I recommend assessing your opportunities from three angles:

• Is the company committed to helping ICs grow as managers? Do your due diligence. Does the company identify a “management” track? What does the entry-level role as a manager look like – what are the expectations (which are usually captured in a form of engineering ladder, or captured informally as “role cards” of people currently in that role)? Most importantly, does the company have a track record of switching ICs into a management track? How many people have become managers that way? If you can, meet them during the “courting” phase to understand their paths. Don’t expect a standard journey, but try to see if these paths indicate some intentionality on the part of the company’s leadership.
• Does the company believe in transparency and does it live this value? To grow as a manager, you will need to be given context “from above”, because a major part of a manager’s job is to synthesize context for their team. A company that doesn’t show that it cares about transparency will make it difficult for you to overcome the “activation energy” of shifting from an IC to a manager. It’s important to get past the sales pitch here – many leadership teams will extol the virtues of transparency only to behave very differently day to day. Here, too, you can ask about specifics of ways in which the company was transparent in ways that weren’t also good for the business (e.g. it’s easy to share how great the quarter was; it’s harder to admit to a poor quarter)
• Is the company structured appropriately for managers to grow? What is the current ratio of managers to ICs – if low, it may be an indication that it is difficult to “break through” to management. If high, it may mean that management titles are inflated and while you will have your LinkedIn trophy title, you may not end up learning much as a quasi-manager

I advise aspiring managers to set expectations as they go through the “sell” phase before they accept their offer. You don’t need to demand to become a manager; but I wouldn’t let your prospective manager off the hook either. For example, instead of asking “will I have a chance to become a manager?” (too easy for a noncommittal “sure!”), ask “can you share a sample path I could take as a manager?” or “How would you visualize my journey and what could the first milestone be?”. Make sure that you signal that you aren’t in a rush, and that you care about the fundamentals of management vs vanity attributes (such as just scoring the title).

Once you are at the company, you need to focus on three prerequisites to a successful switch to management:

You need to build skills

Most of us are not born managers or even leaders. It’s certainly not something we learn in school; and often the skills you are expected to excel at as an IC tend to get in the way of your growth as a manager. For example, many new managers who were strong ICs find it very frustrating – or risky – to rely on others to do the work that they would take minutes to do. Moreover, as an IC you are incentivized on relatively easy to measure and observe metrics such as delivery or capability to problem-solve; as a manager, your value add becomes a lot more fuzzy, long-term and probabilistic. In essence, even the best managers try a lot of things and hope that most of them end up making a difference.

I believe there are a handful of fundamental skills and abilities which you should be able to pick up without a ton of external help and without the need to already be in a manager role. Being cognizant of them and assessing yourself on them (and later, asking your manager to assess you on) can help you do some of the prep work that often catches aspiring managers by surprise. They aren’t easy to get good at, but by seeing the work you do through the lens of these skills, you may be able to create forcing mechanisms and find opportunities to improve.

• White-space thinking. A solid manager by and large takes more initiative to investigate, expand on, and leverage the “white-spaces”: the areas in between the well-defined projects; the gaps on the team; the topics that aren’t on people’s mind but that, when raised, result in a passionate discussion. This makes sense – the manager is essentially expected to be a “catch-all” for outcomes so they need to spend more time in white-space than other team members do. As an IC, you can grow in white-space thinking by explicitly tasking yourself with identifying challenges or opportunities that nobody is thinking about. Share your findings with your manager; you may not get to address most of them, but the resulting conversation can help you calibrate your judgment of what is important to pick up. Furthermore, try to find adjacencies to the work that you do – areas that don’t seem to have an owner. Are any of them important to pick up?
• Taking initiative is an important ability that is often coupled with the above. This means initiating projects or work that you believe is valuable to do. Of course, your initiative may get shot down (people worry a lot about getting their ideas rejected; in fact, companies have the opposite problem of not enough engineers thinking about things that aren’t right in front of them), but if it’s not, you’ve added value that likely nobody would have added.
• Continuous improvement. The best managers see everything around them as a “machine” that can be examined, have undesirable outcomes diagnosed, and improved. As an IC most of these “machines” are limited in scope – usually they are projects you’re a part of, and some of the team-wide processes. Managers deal with more complex systems, which take the people, the existing processes/conventions and tooling as inputs, and think about ways to improve the “black box” that converts them into outcomes. This focus on continuous improvement is valuable as you shift into the management track, and it’s something you can get better at with some practice. To practice, simply start asking yourself what “machines” you see around you, and identify problems with these machines. Ask your manager if you can run retrospectives or post-mortems; when you run them, focus on deep diagnosis (did you get to the root causes?) and make sure the takeaways/action items actually happen, even if you have to do much of the work. This is also a good opportunity to be data-driven: what metrics define the functioning of the “machines” around you and how can we measure and improve these metrics?
• External communication. Much communication that you will do as an IC will be with other ICs on your team, and with your manager. But you can create plenty of opportunities to communicate outside of this narrow band. The easiest such areas are product managers. PMs are always hungry for more collaboration with engineers; spend some time with your PM, educate them on the product in general, or the trade-offs of some recent technical decision. Similarly, consider writing up “spotlights” on recent features or refactoring work and sharing with the business users. This allows you to think about how to communicate to an audience that’s not necessarily technical, doesn’t have all the context, or time to process information – all very real circumstances.
• Doing what you said you would do. This one is definitely in the category of “abilities that everyone should have” but I continue to be surprised how often engineers don’t deliver on what they themselves committed to, especially if it’s a commitment not related to writing code. As a manager, the majority of work you do will be outside of code, and there it is very important that you build a reputation as someone who delivers on your commitments. A common roadblock for people is an inability to keep track of commitments, so an easy first step here is to write down (even if it seems pedantic) everything you said you will do, and to make sure you check off each box.
• A close sibling of the above is Catching all attempts for others to communicate with you. There is a proliferation of different channels through which people can be asking you questions, asking you to do something or in some way having an implicit expectations of you. I monitor my email, Slack, JIRA tasks assigned to me, JIRA comments, Confluence comments, Google Docs comments, our Applicant Tracking comments, etc. Sometimes it feels that all I do is respond to the various pings. Hopefully as an engineer you won’t be getting pulled in so many directions, but it is important that people who reach out to you in various ways don’t feel that they can’t get in touch. A quick acknowledgement or a reaction (thumbs up, etc.) is a perfect way to reduce anxiety on the other side; if you can’t or won’t realistically have time to answer a question, just say it instead of being silent. Many people don’t want to say no, but by saying nothing, you’re leaving the requestor hanging, which is much worse.

Ideally, you can build a support network around you to help you grow in these skills. The easiest thing to do is to talk to your manager and tell him about the growth plan you’ve created for yourself (a great example of initiative-taking). List the above skills and show self-awareness by grading yourself on these. Then ask your manager to grade you on them. Ask how you should tweak these based on what your manager believes you should work on. You don’t have to bring up the “management” thing too early in the conversation if you think it may make the manager dismissive (or defensive) – most of the above apply to tech leads or even very senior, effective engineers.

What to do if your manager isn’t a paradigm of helping people grow, or if they don’t have experience or track record of elevating their team members to management? Have skip level meetings – chats with their manager. Chances are that that person really wants to build a deeper leadership bench, and wants to see the success of their organization growing. You may even phrase the conversations in a way that makes your manager look good.

If you think you are in a good spot to discuss growth into the management track, review the skills from the engineering ladder (if one exists in your company), or the competencies listed in the interview panels for managers. List all skills, not just technical, and ask which ones would be important for someone like you to get good at. In case your manager fears having to “make a case” for you in the next cycle, you can reassure them that you’re in it for the long run and just want to have a compass that you can use to evaluate where you are on an ongoing basis. That gives you the license to check in monthly, which is a much better mechanism for course correcting your growth plan than is an annual review.

You need to have the right exposure

You can have all the ingredients of a manager, but if the decision-makers at the company don’t think of you, you will never be given the opportunity to become one. Hence, just as important as building skills is getting the right kind of exposure.

• Be proactive about the projects you take on. Talk to the PM about the projects coming up to figure out which one may help expose you to the kind of growth you want to experience, or projects which seem like they could give you exposure. While it’s important to think about the optics (projects that will make you look good), don’t focus exclusively on that. Fame is elusive; projects go out of favor and executive priorities shift rapidly. It’s best if you optimize for a combination of growth opportunities, range of challenges and external visibility. And don’t forget to have fun!
• Be thoughtful about what projects you take on. Consider a variety of opportunities. While it’s usually better to be a “lead” of a smaller initiative than merely an anonymous “team member” of a larger one, the latter projects give you exposure to others on the team, who can witness you work and who you can build a reputation with. You may want to take an occasional risk – a new initiative that may not work out or may be scrapped.
• Create a virtuous cycle. The more context you build, the more people come to you, the more visible you are on the team, the more you’re given more context. In fact, I strongly believe that context is one of the most valuable assets for technologists. This is very much true for Product Manager who are significantly handicapped by a lack of context, and true for managers who transact in context, but it’s also true for ICs whose effectiveness is in part a function of how much context they have. That’s why engineers who have been in a company for years are valued (sadly, often undervalued for the value they bring).
• Consider “extroverted” opportunities. As an engineer, you write code. But there are a multitude of opportunities that involve more than you and a bunch of text files. Put more weight on activities that involve other people. That includes coaching of junior engineers, onboarding of new ones, pairing with engineers for a particularly challenging problem, helping other engineers troubleshoot, or being a go-to person for the PM. These are all 1:1 opportunities which even the more introverted engineers can handle. As you feel more confident with others on the team, consider roles which put you in front of the entire team. Start small – ask your manager if you can run standups. Or facilitate grooming sessions, which often requires not much more than collecting information and keeping the team focused. From there, you can “graduate” to running retrospectives or being “incident commander”

You need a sponsor

Finally, there needs to be someone who cares about you becoming a manager. Often, you will get lucky and your manager will see it as their job to help people on their team grow. Try to figure out if your manager believes that you can be a manager. If you don’t think they will necessarily be straight with you, instead of asking about a management role, ask a more open-ended question. What roles do you see me grow into in 18 months?

But your manager isn’t the only possible sponsor (and often, especially in very top-down organizations, your manager won’t be able to help you at all). Consider building a relationship with their manager. Talk to other managers. Some organizations encourage lateral shifts between teams. Being the person that other managers think of can help you land a technical leadership position on another team that just happens to grow.

Talk to other people “in transition”. As you become serious about the management path, you will soon start noticing who seems to “have what it takes” to become a manager. Instead of thinking of yourself as competing with that person, collaborate. There is plenty of leadership opportunities in most companies.

Finally, if you think you’ve tried all of the above and there simply isn’t “room” for someone to transition to a manager, reframe the problem. Make a case for a position of leadership (maybe not personnel management) based on unstaffed mandates, under-resourced teams, or areas that are likely to become problems in the near future. Grow the “pie”.

A journey to become a manager isn’t cookie-cutter. Everyone has their own unique story. The upside is that you can shape a path that feels just right for you. But it is also more challenging to know if you’re “doing the right things”; there isn’t a recipe you can follow. In a way, it’s very indicative of the characteristics of the job you want to have: being a manager means having to make judgment calls in non-formulaic ways, adding value in non-linear fashion, often wondering if what you’re doing makes a difference. If you become comfortable with the path you take to become a manager, that should give you some reassurance about the future. If the path feels painful, you may want to re-evaluate your assumptions. Either way, you will have to put yourself out there a lot, and while at first it will be awkward, it only gets easier.