Why I’m writing

I came to engineering management through an unlikely route — law school, two bar exams, a coding bootcamp, and about a decade of figuring out how software teams actually work. I’m a senior engineering manager now, leading multiple teams, and the role keeps changing faster than any job description could capture.

I started writing these notes to make sense of my own experience as that happened, usually in stolen moments before work or after my children’s bedtime, typed furiously into the notes app on my phone so I wouldn’t lose the thought. Over time I realized the same questions keep surfacing for people stepping into or growing inside leadership — what the job actually requires, how to lead through things you didn’t choose, what to do when the decision is already made.

These are my attempts to answer those questions honestly. Not from a distance, but from inside the work.

If you’re moving into engineering leadership — or already there and trying to figure out what it actually is — I hope something here feels familiar.