You Don't Wait to Lead — a practical path from engineer to engineering leader

Most engineers are told leadership is a promotion you wait for. It isn't — it's a set of habits you can start building today, from wherever you sit.
Drawing on 20+ years leading engineering teams across startups and high-growth companies — and on the hard lessons of the path between writing code and leading the people who write it — this talk reframes leadership as something you grow into deliberately, not something handed to you.
We'll look at what actually changes when you move from optimizing your own output to optimizing a team's: how priorities shift, why your relationship with time and feedback has to change, and how to build technical credibility and influence before you hold the title. We'll separate the myths (leadership = management = no more coding) from the practices that compound: mentorship, owning your growth, stepping up for unglamorous problems, and learning in public.


Key Takeaways
Lead before the title — concrete ways an IC can lead projects, systems, and people now, without waiting for a promotion.
Understand the real shift — what changes from IC to leader: optimizing the team's output over your own, and the priority reordering (company → team → individuals → self) that trips up most new leaders.
Build the foundations early — technical breadth for credibility, finding mentors (and being one), and learning from every manager you've had — the good and the bad.
Cont'ed