The Promotion That Changed Everything
When I moved from Principal QA Engineer to Deputy Head of Engineering at Bykea, I made three significant mistakes in the first 90 days. I’m writing this so you don’t have to make the same ones.
But first — the context. I was promoted because I was good at engineering. I could design automation frameworks, ship releases, mentor engineers, and solve production incidents. I was promoted into a role where none of those things were the job anymore.
That’s the trap of technical leadership.
Mistake 1: Trying to Stay the Best Engineer in the Room
For the first month, I kept deep-diving into technical decisions. Writing Appium scripts when my team could write them. Reviewing every PR in detail. Architecting solutions that engineers should have been architecting.
I felt productive. I was actually being counterproductive.
The math: If I’m spending 4 hours on something a senior engineer could do in 5, I’ve saved the company 1 hour — but I’ve also failed to do the 4 hours of work only I can do: unblocking 3 squads, removing cross-team friction, and making decisions that compound.
The shift: measure your leverage, not your output. A good engineering lead’s output is other engineers shipping faster and better. That’s invisible in your own code contributions.
Mistake 2: Running Standups Instead of Enabling Them
I ran excellent standups. Clear format, on time, good energy. I also ran them for 3 squads of 25+ people, which is deeply inefficient and signals something worrying about trust.
If I have to be in every standup for it to run well, I’ve built a single point of failure. If I’m the only one who can unblock decisions in the meeting, I’ve built a bottleneck with a face.
The fix: Invest in squad leads. Give them authority to run their own standups, their own retros, and their own technical decisions within defined boundaries. Your job is to set the context, the standards, and the strategy — then get out of the way.
Standups I didn’t attend started getting more honest. Engineers who were nervous to surface blockers in front of the engineering lead became more candid with their squad lead. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Mistake 3: Confusing Activity with Impact
My calendar was full. Meetings, reviews, interviews, planning sessions, stakeholder updates. I felt maximally busy. After 60 days, I looked at what had actually shipped and realized: the features shipped, but the way features were being built hadn’t improved.
Activity ≠ impact. The most important work of an engineering lead is often invisible:
- The friction you removed before it became a bottleneck
- The hiring decision that brought in someone who raised the whole team’s bar
- The process change that prevented 3 sprints of rework
- The architecture conversation you had before bad patterns got committed
Start tracking a “leverage log” — a weekly note of the two or three things you did that will have compounding effects. If the log is empty, you’re in execution mode, not leadership mode.
What Actually Works
Become a career sponsor, not just a manager. The engineers who feel you’re actively invested in their growth will go further for the mission than any incentive. I lost good engineers to companies that paid less because they felt more seen by their manager there.
Make your decision-making legible. When I started writing brief decision logs — why we chose X over Y, what trade-offs we accepted — two things happened. Better decisions got made (writing forces clarity). And engineers started making better decisions themselves because they understood the thinking, not just the outputs.
Create the conditions for others to be heroes. The best engineering leads I’ve seen don’t take credit — they distribute it. When your squad lead ships something excellent, celebrate them loudly. When something goes wrong in production, shield them publicly and coach them privately.
The Honest Summary
The transition from senior engineer to engineering lead is a career change, not a promotion. The skills that got you here are not the skills that will make you excellent in the new role.
The engineers who struggle most in this transition are the ones who were the best engineers. Because being excellent at something, then choosing to do less of it for the sake of others’ growth, requires a specific kind of ego management that talent doesn’t automatically provide.
If you’re in the first 90 days of an engineering lead role: resist the urge to contribute technically. Invest that energy in understanding the system that produces engineering outcomes — and then improve that system.
The code will be better for it.