About a year ago I transitioned from a senior software engineering role into an engineering manager role for the second time in my career. The first time I did this transition was at P&G and there was still a good amount of code writing and shipping software that was expected of me day to day. Very player coach. This time around, at Honeycomb, no expectation of shipping code but there is a real responsibility to guide technical strategy and decision-making. There was a lot that felt familiar about this pendulum swing since it was my second time going through it, but without code as a reliable, predictable safety net to fall back on, I also had to wrestle with new feelings and experiences that surprised me at times.
What Felt Familiar
Adjusting to a different kind of output is something mentioned in almost every IC-to-EM blog post, and for good reason. I experienced this adjustment both times, and it was easier to accept the second time around because I was mentally prepared for it. As an IC, you can pick a task, internalize the problem, solve the problem, and ship it to prod within a couple hours if the task is small enough. You feel a sense of accomplishment and move on to the next one. As an EM, it’s pretty rare to work on something and get a sense of accomplishment from it same day. You still output artifacts of your work like strategy documents or roadmaps but it takes time to get buy-in, allow change to take place, and observe the impact of your efforts.
The output adjustment I saw coming. I also anticipated needing solid self-care practices in this role from my previous experience, but I did find myself surprised by how these self-care practices felt a bit harder to cultivate and stay disciplined in as a WFH manager since my last EM role was in office. The WFH context elevated these practices from being important to being absolute nonnegotiables. I found myself needing a morning routine that would set me up well for the day since I had less flexibility and autonomy over my calendar due to meeting load. Days when I skip my morning routine make me feel like my day hasn’t actually started until work is over and that I have no time to be a person until 6pm.
Things like getting 7-8h good sleep each night, moving your body regularly, eating a relatively healthy diet all make it easier to show up at your best to support your team. And yes, I hear you, those things are important for just existing as a human and everyone benefits from dialing these things in. However, if these things got a bit out of whack while in my IC role, I could tolerate it longer. It didn’t impact my work as much. I could muscle through writing and shipping code on 4-5 hours of sleep and it only made my life harder. Trying to get through a day of 1:1s with a sleep deprived brain makes the whole team’s life harder.
What Was New
This past year was one of near-constant change, certainly more change than I’d experienced in my previous EM stint. People and priorities shifted throughout the year with a throughline of complex cross-team work that needed to be orchestrated. I got to participate in a coaching program this year that provided 360 feedback from my team and that feedback highlighted that my team was perceiving me as a calm, transparent manager who set appropriate context without fretting too much about all the change. In retrospect, I think I was able to show up that way because I was spending cycles worrying about all of the change internally.
IC Instincts Without an Outlet
Worrying and overthinking wasn’t new for me, but something about how it manifested felt different this time, specific to this transition. Removing the comfort and predictability of writing code and shipping software from my responsibilities changed a lot more about how I experienced management than I expected. Writing code has a certain predictability to it. I think I found solace in that the first time around. Taking that piece away means a lot more of the work is prone to unpredictability and, at least for me, the instincts I’d built as an IC weren’t always helpful in dealing with that.
For example, as an IC, if you sit with a problem long enough you’ll generally find your way to a solution. Sustained focus + time = solution. The problem yields to your attention. As a manager, it doesn’t quite work that way. It’s a slower process to even get all the inputs you need to solve something. There’s more judgement needed on what the right time is to evaluate a specific problem.
As an IC, if I cared enough about something I could just… do it. Start the day a little earlier, write the code, ship the thing. Drag it across the finish line. This intensity of caring doesn’t translate to a manager’s ability to achieve an outcome. But at the same time, these instincts don’t just stop firing because they’re not useful anymore. They generate stress that has nowhere to go.
Where the Stress Goes
This stress led to a pattern a couple of times over the past year where I was dealing with a challenging interpersonal situation or a complex cross-team ownership decision and I would sit with it, think about it from all angles, generate an action plan, revise the action plan multiple times over and then… poof. The situations resolved themselves through factors external to myself. All this stress and buildup for nothing.
This rumination didn’t just happen through the work day either. I was stewing on these situations and what I should do as I unloaded the dishwasher or walked my dog. It wasn’t sustainable, especially with the pattern of constant change where there often was something new to stew about.
So on one hand, thinking through things intensely in this way is, I think, why my team perceives me as a calm manager who has things under control. Part of the job is absorbing uncertainty so your team doesn’t have to after all. Things like thinking through how a potential priority shift would or wouldn’t impact the team’s work or how our scope of ownership might need to adjust after a reorg. On the other hand, I was giving too much of myself to these thoughts, especially when the workday was over. I worried if I continued on this path I’d be prone to burnout.
What I Learned to Do Differently
Timeboxing is an idea I’ve been familiar with for years but really only used for technical problems. A tricky bug that’s a middling priority? Spend an hour or two to see if you can resolve it and if not, take some notes about what you learned and drop it.
It never occurred to me to use this same approach for interpersonal challenges before this year, but it was an incredibly helpful reframe. Not every problem can or needs to be solved in one intense sitting, and as I learned from several situations resolving themselves, not every problem needs to be solved by you at all. When you’re writing software, your inputs are the ones that matter. The code isn’t changing itself while you step away. With interpersonal challenges, there’s a person on the other side who’s also processing, reflecting, and sometimes resolving things on their own timeline. Timeboxing this way really helped cut down on the rumination internally. This internal management strategy paired with conversations with my career coach or peer EMs as an external outlet made this more sustainable.
Another shift was recalibrating my sense of time. Early on in the transition, I was focused on what I could affect today because it most closely mapped to how I was thinking about time as an IC. What decision can I make right now, what can I unblock this week? Logically I knew the manager job requires holding a longer time horizon, but it took a few months to understand and adjust to how working on the right time horizon felt. This didn’t come up as much in my role at P&G because there was more stability. My team at Honeycomb needs me to have done some amount of thinking about where we’re headed before they get there. A decision about next month felt distant at first; now I want a couple months planned out. Decisiveness as a manager isn’t always about speed but it is about understanding that what counts as “soon” changed.
This brings me back to the point about self-care being nonnegotiable. I already knew having a strong self-care practice affected my ability to show up sharp for a day of 1:1s and make decisions about tradeoffs. But after a year of absorbing uncertainty on behalf of my team, I understand the stakes differently. Sleep, exercise, and a morning routine I can rely on both make me a functional manager on any given day and make absorbing the uncertainty sustainable. You can’t fret on your team’s behalf if you’re running on empty.
I’m still figuring a lot of this out and trying to show up as the best manager I can for my team each day. I still fight the instinct to bear down on problems I can’t solve alone and catch myself caring too much about the meeting that went off the rails while I’m unloading the dishwasher. But I have awareness of these patterns and how I ideally want to respond to them so I can catch myself. The second time through this transition taught me that knowing what to expect doesn’t necessarily protect you from it but it does change your perspective and what you’re able to learn. The first time, I learned the mechanics of being a manager. This time, I’m learning how to make navigating the sticky parts sustainable for me.