Why your high performer became a manager (and what broke)

Your best engineer becomes a manager. Within six months, two things are usually true: the team is worse off than it was, and the engineer is unhappy. Neither is a surprise, both are predictable from the day the promotion happened.

What goes wrong

• The skills that made them great as an IC don’t transfer.
• The team expects them to keep coding, which makes management an afterthought.
• They don’t get coaching, most companies don’t have it for first-time managers.
• The metrics that previously made them visible to leadership no longer apply.

How to make the transition work

Give them a peer manager mentor. Reduce their team to 3-4 people initially, not 8. Don’t expect coding output. And accept that there’s a 6-12 month dip, anything else is wishful thinking.

First-time managers fail because the job is new. The company fails them by pretending it isn’t.