Engineering Leadership · Chapter 1 of 8
What actually changes at each level
The most common leadership failure is doing the previous job well. This is what the new one is.
Every step in a leadership career changes what your output is and how long it takes to find out whether you were right. Almost every struggling leader is executing the previous level competently.
The specific traps at each step
| Step | The trap | What it looks like from outside |
|---|---|---|
| Senior → EM | Still writing the critical code | You are the bottleneck, and your team is not growing |
| EM → Director | Managing managers as if they were engineers | You skip-level into decisions, and your managers stop deciding |
| Director → VP | Holding on to what should be delegated | You are in every room and none of them properly |
| Any → any | Keeping the last job as a comfort blanket | You do the familiar work well and the new work not at all |
The question that tells you whether you have made the transition
“What did you do last week that only you could have done?”
If the honest answer at EM level is ‘I fixed the hardest bug’, you have not made the step. If at director level it is ‘I ran the sprint planning for one team’, the same. The answer should get progressively less concrete and more consequential, which is uncomfortable and is the point.