For me the first kind of day-to-day transition was from basic development to leading projects. I started to get more responsibility. I was now managing technical requirements, work priorities and allocation of tasks to other developers. My work, development split was probably 80% coding/20% project management. You start spending more time managing tasks, working with product & UI, as well as managing expectations with the business. There's no people management or anything with this.
From here the percentage keeps going down. So next I moved on to taking multiple projects. Now you're leading developers across more than one, which requires you to be less actively coding in general - you need to be able to assist from a management perspective at any time. You get involved with more meetings and discussions in general.
Naturally this then leads into people management, with goals, performance and regular one to ones. Again it lowers the coding %. The higher you go, the less coding (naturally). I'm now involved in digital business strategy, R & D and various other bits and pieces. I'm no longer at the level of actively coding on any of these specific projects, only on spikes/concepts. I am still across all the projects at a reasonably high level however.
Each one of these shifts I realised I was less a developer and more of a manager. The responsibility shifts were always pretty clear to me. Originally I said I never wanted to do people management, yet here we are! Don't get me wrong, I'm still very hands on and I'm still a developer, it's just a much smaller % (probably 30/40%) than it was before.
tl;dr development => development with project management => more projects => people management => higher level business focus
Excellent question. I'll try and break it down.
For me the first kind of day-to-day transition was from basic development to leading projects. I started to get more responsibility. I was now managing technical requirements, work priorities and allocation of tasks to other developers. My work, development split was probably 80% coding/20% project management. You start spending more time managing tasks, working with product & UI, as well as managing expectations with the business. There's no people management or anything with this.
From here the percentage keeps going down. So next I moved on to taking multiple projects. Now you're leading developers across more than one, which requires you to be less actively coding in general - you need to be able to assist from a management perspective at any time. You get involved with more meetings and discussions in general.
Naturally this then leads into people management, with goals, performance and regular one to ones. Again it lowers the coding %. The higher you go, the less coding (naturally). I'm now involved in digital business strategy, R & D and various other bits and pieces. I'm no longer at the level of actively coding on any of these specific projects, only on spikes/concepts. I am still across all the projects at a reasonably high level however.
Each one of these shifts I realised I was less a developer and more of a manager. The responsibility shifts were always pretty clear to me. Originally I said I never wanted to do people management, yet here we are! Don't get me wrong, I'm still very hands on and I'm still a developer, it's just a much smaller % (probably 30/40%) than it was before.
tl;dr development => development with project management => more projects => people management => higher level business focus
Thanks for the answer. I imagine it was incredible journey! Good luck in a future.