Not sure if this situation will be familiar to you or not, but at least try to imagine this: one day you're worrying about your (4 engineers) team's backlog — what will we do next? What features are we going to ship?
And just like that, the next day, you are responsible for 18 engineers across 4 teams, and everyone's looking at you like you have everything under control. Spoiler alert: you don't.
And just like that, the next day, you are responsible for 18 engineers across 4 teams, and everyone's looking at you like you have everything under control. Spoiler alert: you don't.
To be fair, it didn’t happen like that. At least, not so sudden. My team was performing really well, and we were getting ready a very cool and vital product for our company. Then, the Head of 3 teams left the company. That’s when I got promoted from Team Lead to Head of Engineering.
My first instinct was to do something. Reorganize things. Call more meetings. Make your mark. But here's what I learned: sometimes the best thing you can do is absolutely nothing.
I'm genuinely proud that work continued uninterrupted. No delayed projects. No drama. No "new sheriff in town" nonsense that usually accompanies these transitions. The existing structure was working, so I left it alone. Four teams performing admirably well, established processes, code shipped. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
But here's the thing about an internal promotion like that — you're suddenly managing people who, technically, were your peers yesterday. That's a weird dynamic. These team leads didn't choose me. They inherited me. And I had to earn their trust while figuring out what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
The real eye-opener wasn't the technical challenges or the strategic decisions. It was understanding (or at least try to understand) the people that I was going to be working with. When you're leading one team, you get to know 4–6 people really well. When you're overseeing 18 engineers, you're dealing with 18 different communication styles, career goals, personal interests and ways of processing feedback.
Here's where I embraced lessons from the Extreme Ownership framework, which I learned in 2024 and implemented in a smaller scale in my team:
- Extreme Ownership. Every delay, every missed opportunity for collaboration, every communication breakdown — that was on me, not the teams. I couldn't blame anyone or anything else. I accepted full responsibility for our results, kept what was good, and discarded what wasn’t working… but subtly.
Getting to know the people I’m working with is a big part of taking True Ownership, so I set myself on a mission to know each one of the team members by having 121s with everyone every quarter, in addition to the weekly meetups with the leads. - Cover and Move. We had a mission to accomplish. A set of products and services to deliver… and keeping teams isolated to each other, wasn’t doing any good. I started fostering collaboration between teams, and soon, magic started to happen.
I gave the teams space to do their work while slowly creating opportunities for cross-team awareness. Not forced collaboration — just visibility. Sometimes that's enough to spark organic connections. - Decentralize Command. Trying to coordinate everything through myself would make me the bottleneck. Instead, I focused on ensuring the team leads understood the broader goals and trusted that I had their backs. Then I got out of their way.
This "no interference" approach worked better than I expected, but it required serious discipline on my part. The illusion of control can be a powerful adversary.
The results were actually very good. Team Leads started to feel comfortable working with me. Team members knew they had access to me at any time, and they did come to me with great questions and proposals. Trust was slowly, but steadily, earned.
Looking back, I wish I'd started encouraging collaboration earlier, but I also think my restraint saved me from making bigger mistakes. New managers love to shake things up. I truly believe that the best leadership is taking full Ownership of the situation while empowering others to execute.
The hardest part of this job isn't the technical decisions, the budget meetings or the monthly reporting. It's earning trust with people who used to be your peers, while simultaneously helping them see beyond their immediate work to the bigger picture. That's the real challenge of scaling from Team Lead to Head of Engineering.