Leading with heart: what 18 years taught me about managing engineers
I became a manager the way most engineers do: good at the technical work, promoted, and handed a team with almost no guidance. I made plenty of mistakes in that first stretch, and some of them hurt people I was supposed to be helping.
In 2023 I wrote down what I had learned. Three years later, I lead a 25-engineer team spread across the US and Latin America, fully remote, in a company built around agentic AI. Some of those old lessons held up exactly. A few matter more now than they did then.
This is the updated version. It is not a framework. Think of it as a conversation with someone a few years behind you on the same road.
Ask for help. You are not a superhero
The move from engineer to manager was one of the most transformative phases of my career, and the one where I had the least guidance. As a developer I was used to hard problems that were logical and technical. Managing people added a different kind of complexity: figuring out not just what could be done, but what should be done, and by whom.
I remember the anxiety more than any specific project. I also remember how easy it was, in that state, to get the tone or the words wrong with the team.
My first piece of advice is the one I needed most: seek help. Find a mentor, a peer manager, someone a step ahead of you, and talk to them early and often. Being the manager does not mean you have to have every answer. It means you are responsible for finding them.
Authority comes from clarity, not volume
Every new manager runs the same loop in their head: should I be strict? Am I being too soft? How do I get respect?
The answer is simpler than the anxiety suggests. You never need to raise your voice or play tough. There is always a polite, clear way to say what needs to happen. Treat people as collaborators, not subordinates. Instead of asserting authority, explain precisely what is needed and why.
Early on, I was sometimes stern and assertive when I did not need to be. Looking back, that came from insecurity, from a need to prove I belonged in the role. It did not make anyone respect me more. It just made the work harder for the people actually delivering it.
So here is the rule I keep: don’t let your insecurity leak into how you treat people. They are the ones who ship. Your job is to motivate them, clear the path, and own it with them when things go wrong.
To the people who worked with me during that phase: I’m sorry. If my inexperience made your job harder, it was never intentional. I was still learning.
I wish I could say this was a new-manager problem I left behind. It wasn’t. Not long ago, I made the same mistake again.
For years I had led senior teams, and with them empathy came easily, almost on autopilot. Then I took on a team that was more junior and going through a harder phase. Under that pressure, the old sternness came back. Seeing it in myself again was humbling.
The lesson is that this is not a stage you graduate from. Pressure brings old reflexes back. Leading with heart is easy when the team is strong and things are calm. It counts most when they are not, and you have to keep choosing clarity over volume.
Keep the work from becoming endless
Maybe you already consider yourself organized. Keep reading anyway. In management, the hard part is not organizing tasks. It is stopping them from multiplying. Every conversation with your team, a stakeholder or a client can add three items to your list.
I won’t prescribe tools, but one book helped me a lot: Getting Things Done. It taught me how to prioritize what felt impossible.
The habit that made the biggest difference was simple: clear the short tasks right away. That frees up room for the things nobody planned, which, as a manager, is most of your week.
The rest is about building a system that does not depend on you remembering everything:
- Structure the team so decisions do not all route through you.
- Automate what repeats. Today, a lot of that repetitive work is a good candidate for an agent.
- Keep regular one-on-ones, so problems surface in a conversation instead of in a crisis.
Never stop being technical
The biggest mistake of my career was dropping technical learning to focus entirely on being a manager. I drifted away from the details, and paying that back cost me a lot of late nights studying just to talk with my team as an equal again.
It was worth every one of those nights. Getting back into the technical work changed how I lead. Today I lead knowing my team trusts me both technically and as a manager, and that trust was earned in the work, not granted by a title. Being respected for who I am, and not for my position, is one of the best things this career has given me.
My advice in 2023 was: don’t do it. In 2026, I would say it louder.
The tools engineers use changed more in the last two years than in the decade before. A manager who has not used AI coding agents seriously cannot tell good adoption from theater, cannot review an agent-driven workflow, and cannot help the engineers who are struggling with it. When we started measuring AI usage on my team, adoption turned out to be uneven. You can only help the people who are behind if you use the same tools every day and know where they fail.
That does not mean you need to out-code your team. It means staying close enough to the work to make good decisions about it. What worked for me:
- A fixed study rhythm, even if it is only a couple of days a week.
- Teaching what you are learning. Presenting a topic to the team forces you to actually understand it.
- Study groups with people who share the interest.
- Building things. I still write code, and open-sourcing the workflow my team uses kept me honest about whether it actually works.
Hire people better than you
Staying technical is not the same as being the best engineer in the room. Leading does not require knowing more than everyone else.
One of the things I am proudest of is hiring people who were technically stronger than me. It is uncomfortable at first, especially if your identity was built on being the strongest engineer. But a team is not a stage for the manager. Every person who knows something you don’t raises what the whole team can do, and that is the job.
Remote works when trust is the default
I have been a remote advocate for a long time. My first remote transition was at Accenture Song, where I helped bring remote work to a technology team inside a company built around client work and office routines. Then I went fully remote at Justpoint, and I have worked that way ever since. Today the whole team I lead is remote, across the US and Latin America. The lessons from that first transition still apply.
Agree on the rules together. When we made the change, the team and I wrote the guidelines as a group: regular collaboration days, clear communication, being reachable during working hours, a remote-first mindset, the same performance bar regardless of location, the right tools, and remote events for sharing knowledge. Rules people helped write are rules people keep.
Trust beats surveillance. Monitoring tools and time logs are not the answer. Visibility should come from the work itself: daily stand-ups, code reviews, technical checkpoints. If you need a screenshot tool to know whether someone is working, the problem is not remote work.
Write things down. Distributed teams live or die on written context. The same reason specs help AI agents helps distributed humans: the context lives in a document instead of in someone’s head, and nobody has to be online at the same time to get it.
Communication between teams is the hard part. Inside one team, remote is easy to get right. Across teams, product, design and engineering, it takes deliberate, shared processes, and it never feels finished.
Plan the in-person time. Distance quietly erodes connection. Unity can hold while the deeper integration slips. In a remote culture, planned time together is an investment, not a perk.
The payoff is real. People feel trusted from day one. Without commutes and office interruptions, commitment and output go up. And when life happens, a new baby, a move, a family situation, people can handle it without choosing between their life and their job.
Care, sincerely
If there is one thing that defines how I lead, it is genuine care for the team. Early on, I fumbled it. I did not yet know how to balance what the company needed with what the team needed. With experience, I learned to hold my values even when that balance is hard.
Caring is not being soft. It means honest, human conversations without formality or judgment, including the ones that carry tough feedback. Those are the conversations where both people grow. Try to understand what each person is going through, and make it safe for them to do the same for you.
Once I worked this way, managing got a lot easier. The team stopped being a group I supervised and became people I trust, who trust me back. Across time zones, through a screen, with agents doing more of the typing every month, that part has not changed at all.
To everyone I have led, the times I got it right and the times I got it wrong: each of you shaped how I lead today. Thank you.
This is an updated version of a post I first published on Medium in 2023.