What Excites Me About Leadership. Leadership isn't something you figure… | by Evelina Vrabie | Jumpstart | Feb, 2026 | Medium

The shift from solving problems for your team to building mechanisms that help other teams marks the real transition into senior leadership. When you solve something just for your direct reports, you get a half-done feeling. The real leverage comes when you build systems beyond your immediate scope and those systems get picked up without mandates. This is what "first team" thinking actually means in practice - not just talking about it in meetings, but feeling uncomfortable when your solutions don't scale past your org boundary.

The best engineering leaders don't look for the right answer - they look for evidence of rigorous thinking. When someone brings you a proposal, you should be asking what they're optimizing for, what it costs to get this wrong, and what would need to be true for this to be the right approach. Push for explicit trade-offs: what are we trading away, will we regret this in 12 months, what is this costing us monthly while we debate. The engineers who anticipate these questions, explain trade-offs simply, and seek input from outside their team are the ones building trust. Red flags show up when recommendations are too clean (all engineering problems have ugly trade-offs), when someone can't tell you what would make them wrong, or when they haven't sought input from guilds and cross-functional reviews.

The biggest bottlenecks are rarely technical - they're alignment, focus, and ownership. Engineering and product teams often argue about the same things using different words, so teaching shared vocabulary unlocks more than any technical solution. Quantify the invisible: "our p90 latency is too high" gets ignored, but "30K per month in lost revenue" gets budget. Use data to enhance empathy, not as a weapon. Numbers become a way to find common ground when everyone can see the same reality. The motto that stood the test of time: "We can solve everything, but we can't solve everything at the same time." Not all problems need the same weight, so ask if this is a reversible or irreversible decision and what's the smallest thing we could ship to learn.