Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role.

Managers who spent most of their careers in top-down, orchestration-heavy environments often discover a hidden skill gap when they move into senior, leadership-heavy roles. The article breaks management work into six steps-problem discovery, problem selection, solution discovery, solution selection, execution, and ongoing revision-and shows that orchestration-heavy managers typically only own the latter half. Recognizing the full loop is the first step to becoming an effective leader.

The piece lists tell-tale signs of an orchestration-heavy mindset: treating prioritization as the only lever, accepting problems and solutions without questioning their validity, and focusing exclusively on sprint cadence. These habits are useful but become constraints when a leader must set direction, choose problems, and shape narratives.

The author proposes a four-step core loop for leadership-heavy roles: identify the right problems, decide on a destination, explain the path, and communicate data and narrative evidence of progress. Applying this loop drives promotion, headcount, and team impact. It also forces managers to surface bottom-up ideas, challenge executive assumptions, and align cross-functional stakeholders.

Finally, the article stresses that a senior manager must be comfortable writing code, product specs, or architecture sketches enough to prove domain fluency. If gaps exist, the leader should draft a concrete plan to close them and share it with their team. Owning the full problem-solution narrative, not just execution, is the decisive advantage in leadership-heavy environments.