In early 2013 I transitioned from a developer to a manager of a team of 3 when my manager left suddenly. It took me over two years (and doubling the team size) until I felt like I really understood what it meant to be a manager and thought I was adding value. Here are a few things I’ve learnt and tips others gave to me.
Less Coding
By far the hardest thing for me to realize was that I needed to cut back the amount of coding that I did. There’s only so many hours in a day and I was finding that I could either code or do other, more managerial things, without working a lot of overtime. This is something my boss kept mentioning to me and it was something I was extremely resistant to in the beginning. Since I’d been a developer for my entire career, and programming since I was 15, I thought the way I added value to the company was by writing more code.
It wasn’t until 18 months after I became a manager that I finally started realizing that I could provide value to the company by doing things other than coding.