So You're A Manager Now. | scott kosman

The hardest part of becoming a manager is accepting that your job isn't to do the work anymore. You were probably really good at your job, which is why someone tapped you for management. Now your job is to make sure other people can be good at theirs. You're not the player, you're the coach. That means building systems instead of features, coaching instead of executing, unblocking instead of doing it all yourself. Your instinct under pressure will be to fall back on the skills that got you here - to jump in, write the code, fix the bug, save the day. But that's the exception, not the rule, because you have different critical responsibilities now. Get comfortable with your impact being less visible but more meaningful.

You're going to mess up. Repeatedly. You'll give wrong feedback, avoid tough conversations until they explode, be too hands-on or not hands-on enough. Nobody expects you to have all the answers. You're expected to notice when you screw up, own it, and get better. Your team doesn't need a flawless boss, they need a human one who's willing to grow in public. That builds trust faster than pretending you've got it all figured out. The goal isn't flawless, it's to mess up better each time.

Clarity is one of the most underrated tools you have. You think you're being obvious, but you're not. Spell out expectations. Over-communicate. Set goals in plain language. Without clarity, people spin - they waste time guessing what done means, or whether their work matters, or if you're secretly disappointed in them. Your job is to remove that ambiguity. Define what good looks like. Repeat yourself. Make sure people feel safe asking you to repeat it again. One of your most important daily tasks is providing context - people need to understand why their work matters, why what they're doing is important, and how they're measuring up. If an engineer feels like they're doing pointless busy work, that's a sign you haven't done your job correctly.

Your wins are now your team's wins. When you were an individual contributor, you shipped cool features, fixed nightmare bugs at 2 a.m., got praise and maybe awards. Those days are over. Good managers don't get trophies because you're no longer doing the things, you're empowering the things. When someone from another team thanks one of your engineers for their help or recognizes something they've done, that's your win too because you created an environment where this happens regularly. Management is emotionally expensive - you'll absorb team stress, cross-functional chaos, and your own endless self-doubt. That's the gig. You have to take care of yourself. Block off calendar time to think instead of react. Watch for burnout in yourself and your team - it doesn't always show up as dramatic exhaustion, sometimes it sneaks in quiet and you stop caring.