Rob Hope

Often, a manager role is a “reward” for competency or natural leadership ability. Some will actively seek it out; others actively avoid it; and others just organically end up there, often by business need or an absence of leadership in their space. I fall in the latter category; I’ve never been one to seek out promotion or differing roles, as my goal is always to make the best decisions I can at the time they need to be made. One might say I could have pressed my career further, but I am fairly self-aware and have a pretty solid handle on what I need to be the best version of my professional self regardless of the role I happen to inhabit at any particular time.

My initial management role was in retail. At the age of 19 I was promoted to an Area Manager at the local Bradlees department store in Keene, New Hampshire, where I was working after graduating high school. I’d been there almost three years at that point, having joined just before my junior year. That experience informs a lot more of my viewpoint than you might expect. I was young, not the most mature, and was promoted over several of my peers. That was the most difficult part, to be honest…trying to lead people who the day before had been people you treated as peers and friends. That led to a lot of difficult conversations, a tough adjustment period, and changes to my social circle, including changes in the dynamic of my larger friend group. It often put my role as a friend and young adult in direct conflict with my new professional responsibilities. Not something I’d recommend, even to this day, although I did help transition a direct report from IC to manager in that exact situation. Eventually I left that position and role.

Several years into my technical career I was a Chief Architect for Marketplace Verticals at LoopNet. We were a small team of about six. My manager, who I had a great relationship with, decided that we should try out the new Scrum and Agile methodologies and strongly suggested the role of Scrum Master should fall to me. Little did I know he was positioning me to take on more leadership for the team, as he was considering taken other roles within LoopNet. Eventually he did decide to move on to a different role, and I was given a probationary period to lead the team ahead of a role shift to Technical Manager.

I refer to this as “being dragged into management against my will.” I didn’t choose this path; I didn’t seek out management roles; yes, I was a natural technical leader, but that’s definitely not the same thing. Later in my career, many Individual Contributors (ICs) came to me to ask my advice on whether they should move into management or not. The Kindle teams frequently shifted engineers to manager roles in the same way that I had, at times with little regard for the engineer’s best interests. Each time I would ask the IC why they wanted to become a manager, as often in cases like this, the person changing roles doesn’t know why, and doesn’t understand the depth of the difference in the roles. The most common answer I got was that the person shifting wanted to have more control over outcomes and more say so on what was happening on the team. I would often tell them that that was not a good reason, as managers don’t have any control; they can really only influence the quality of the behavior and decision making. Yes they can give “direction”, but at the end of the day the key to successful managers is their ability to look around corners, properly manage technical decisions and disagreements, earn a high degree of trust, become excellent communicators, effectively set expectations, and effectively coach their team. Control tends to not be a thing.

My role at LoopNet eventually ended at Senior Technical Manager with a team of 13. I then took a bit of a break to determine next steps, and ended up at Amazon as a Software Engineering Manager. Much of what I learned about being an effective manager came from that experience; at the time, Amazon’s Leadership Principles were still a primary input into culture, and they blended well with my natural leadership abilities. In particular, Ownership and Customer Obsession resonated with me, and without having to code in addition to my management responsibilities, I was able to develop to the level that I was part of the group training new SEMs as they joined Amazon.

Occasionally I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed an IC. I’ve never lost the drive to create; I still leverage it in my music projects and at times my own technical projects at home. But I do think that my experiences since LoopNet, at Amazon and now at Atlassian, have shown me that I have much to offer in the way of guidance to the teams that I manage, so in a sense, I’m now building people rather than software, and many days that’s just as rewarding if not more.