The Manager's Path summary

Your first taste of management often arrives quietly, dressed up as mentorship. Maybe you’re assigned a summer intern or asked to help onboard a new college hire. The stakes are lower than formal management, which makes this the perfect training ground to develop your skills.

Start with the practical work of setting your mentee up for success. For a summer intern, you need a project that’s real enough to matter but scoped tightly enough to finish. Look for small features in your own work that would take you a few days to complete. Then sit down with your intern and break that project into clear milestones. Plan to be present heavily in those first few days, then maintain regular check-ins as they find their footing.

The step from mentor to tech lead marks your entry into a dual identity: you’re still writing code alongside your team, but now you’re also steering the ship. You make independent decisions, interface with non-engineers across the company, and carry responsibility for outcomes beyond your own coding.

The skill that separates struggling tech leads from effective ones is project management. This means taking a feature or initiative and breaking it into deliverables clear enough that your team knows exactly what to build. You’re identifying which systems need modification, which features need creation, and how all the pieces fit together. You’ll need to be apt at mapping dependencies – understanding what must happen sequentially and what can run in parallel. You’re also scanning the horizon for unknowns, those potential roadblocks that could derail everything if you don’t spot them early.

So you’ve crossed the threshold from tech lead into actual management. Congrats! People now report directly to you, which means their growth, their frustrations, and their daily work experience now sit squarely in your hands. The first question is: How do you actually get to know someone well enough to manage them effectively?

Start with targeted questions that cut through the usual first-week small talk. Does this person prefer public recognition or private praise? What genuinely excites them about working here? Are there specific manager behaviors they can’t stand? These answers give you a working map of how to support them. Some people prefer a 30-, 60-, or 90-day plan approach. Just make sure that more senior hires have more of a say in their own onboarding roadmap. 

Let’s skip a few rungs now and climb to the very top of the technical ladder: senior technical manager. The company now looks to you for guidance on what to do, how to act, and where to head next. People join because they believe in you and your vision. You set the tone for how the organization operates.

This might mean you’re a VP of Engineering or a CTO. The difference matters. VP of Engineering sits at the top of the engineering career ladder. You need a solid command of managing people, teams, projects, and entire departments. You’re also expected to have good “ground game” – the ability to dive into the nitty gritty when the situation demands it. You’ll have some stake in business strategy, but not as much as the CTO role.