I would make 50% less mistakes when I grew from an engineer to manager if I knew this.

That is: You can control what you can control.

I often felt that there were many things that I would like to change, but I didn’t fully understand that I don’t make all the decisions across the business.

I can control the changes or responsibilities of my team, but for teams outside of my area, I couldn’t make decisions for them.

What I learned is:

The best thing you can do is to establish great relationships across the organization and provide feedback or suggestions to people who are responsible for a particular part of the business.

Things started to look a LOT better after!

P.S. I am sharing all my mistakes in the course Senior Engineer to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role. We start in November. Join engineers from Google, Meta, Revolut, Adobe here: