Jason Warner 1 Lead with confidence, show a little bit of competence, and end with confidence again.
Being a technical executive means possessing talents as a technical people management, Management, a Leadership, along with Executive Skill Set. On top of this, they must possess a breath, if not a depth, of Technical Knowledge. They must be able to Communicating Technical Topics to a variety of audiences. Being a talented Managing Managers is a requirement. Spotting change is an important part of being a technical leader. Running on auto-pilot is a common pattern. Spotting what needs to be changed and executing on it is what makes a good leader2. It is important to consider how you Communicating as an Executive as well as how you Communicating to Executives. Presenting periodic updates in Executive Dashboards is a useful pattern. Will Larson has a quarterly update template for engineering metrics3.
Finding balance as a leader
Measuring a Technical Executive
Technical leadership can be measured across the following dimensions1:
- Impact - value delivered to user
- Scale - Meeting expanding scale and userbase
- Reliability - Uptime
- Deeply Technical vs. People Oriented
- Competence vs. Confidence
- Early what you can build is important. later as you scale, your communication and clairty to stakeholders, read confidence, becomes as important1.
- People, Process, Product
- Adaptable, Opinionated, Dogmatic
- How do you hold your beliefs
- Short-term, Medium Term, Long Term
- What is the time scale you are focused on for your decision making1
- Where are you spending your time?
- Spend time with counter parts in sales and product1
- Velocity, Quality and Customer Impact
- Like the CAP Theorem for Databases you are likely to only be able to get two of: Velocity, Quality, and customer impact1
Career Change
The Reverse Interview is an important part of locating your next job. Once you have found that new job, you must take your Onboarding into your own hands as you Starting a new technical management job.
Anti-patterns anti-patterns Signs of executive dysfunction
1. Kant, E. 7 Mental Models For Great Engineering Leadership Athenian. (2022).
2. Hedlund, M. Interviewing VP of Engineering thread. (2022).
3. Larson, W. Measuring an engineering organization. (2023).