From senior engineer to engineering manager

Where he was

Luis had been a senior engineer at the same company for four years. He mentored the newer engineers, ran most of the team’s planning meetings, and covered for his manager during her leave. Twice, a management role had opened on a neighboring team and gone to someone else. Both times he hadn’t applied. He’d assumed he’d be asked.

The call

He booked the week after the second role was filled. “I’m good at the job they’re giving other people,” he said, a little angrily. We agreed that was probably true, and that nobody at his company knew he wanted it.

What we worked on

The first session was about evidence. We wrote down what he was already doing that managers do: one-to-ones he didn’t call one-to-ones, the planning he ran, the hire he’d helped make. Then we turned it into a short document, a page and a half, describing the team he’d build and the first three things he’d change.

The second session was the conversation itself. We practiced it with his skip-level manager in mind, including the hard questions: “What would you stop doing?” “What if the team doesn’t want you as their manager?” He found he had good answers once he’d said them out loud twice.

The move

He asked for the next opening directly, with the document. When a new team was formed two months later, he was offered it without an external search. He now manages six engineers, including two he used to mentor.

What was harder than expected

Letting go of the code. In his first month as a manager he kept picking up tickets at night because it felt like real work. We used his last session to set a rule: no tickets for ninety days. He broke it twice. He says the third month was the first one where he felt like a manager.