Navigating growth transitions and your own leadership evolution#

TL;DR#

Every step up the management ladder (IC to tech lead, tech lead to manager, manager to manager-of-managers, and onward) is a distinct identity shift with its own grief for what's lost and its own new skill to build - the meta-skill of a long leadership career is recognizing you're mid-transition, naming what you're being asked to give up, and deliberately rebuilding a new sense of "doing the job well" rather than white-knuckling the old one.

The idea#

This subject has walked through a sequence of roles - mentor, tech lead, manager, manager-of-managers, director, VP, CTO - and each transition in that sequence shares a structure: something that used to define competence and identity (writing the best code, being the go-to technical expert, personally knowing every person on your team) has to be given up, and something new and initially less legible (coaching others' judgment, organizational design, multi-year strategic bets) has to be trusted instead, well before it feels as solid as the old skill did. Fournier's closing argument is that this pattern repeats at every level, and that leaders who get stuck are usually stuck not because they lack the new skill in principle, but because they haven't consciously let go of measuring themselves by the old one.

The corollary is that growth in this ladder is not simply "more of the same, but bigger" - the skill that made someone an excellent engineering manager (deep individual 1:1 relationships, hands-on feedback) is not the same skill that makes someone an excellent VP (organization design, cross-functional negotiation, metrics at scale), and success at one level is a weak predictor of success at the next, precisely because each transition demands giving up something that used to work.

How it works#

Name the specific thing being given up at each transition#

Each jump in this subject has a concrete "loss": IC-to-tech-lead gives up some depth for breadth (managers-path/02); tech-lead-to-manager gives up being the top technical contributor for team-outcome ownership (managers-path/03); manager-to-manager-of-managers gives up direct 1:1 relationships with individual engineers for coaching other managers (managers-path/08); director-to-VP gives up team-level organization design for company-level execution and cross-functional politics (managers-path/10, managers-path/11); VP-to-CTO (where applicable) gives up short-term execution ownership for multi-year strategic bets (managers-path/12). Naming the specific loss explicitly - rather than experiencing it as a vague, unexplained dissatisfaction - is what lets a leader recognize "I'm in a transition" instead of concluding "I'm bad at this job" or "this role isn't for me" prematurely.

Expect competence to (temporarily) feel like it drops#

A predictable pattern: right after a promotion or role change, the new responsibilities feel genuinely harder and less natural than the old ones did at their peak, because the leader is comparing their beginner performance in the new role against their expert performance in the old one. Concrete example: a manager who was excellent at running 1:1s and giving feedback becomes a manager-of-managers and finds coaching another manager through a difficult feedback conversation far less satisfying and less clearly "successful" than just having that conversation themselves would have been - not because they've become worse at leadership, but because they're now measuring a genuinely new skill (coaching) against the old skill's (direct feedback) years of practice.

Decide deliberately, not by default, whether to keep climbing#

Fournier is explicit that the top of this ladder is not the right destination for everyone, and that IC tracks (staff/principal engineer) remain a legitimate, equally senior alternative at every step (echoing managers-path/03's framing). The book's closing advice is to make each transition a deliberate choice based on what actually energizes the person - some people find they love the individual mentoring and team-building of engineering management but have no interest in the political, execution-at-scale work of a VP role, and stopping deliberately at the level that fits is a sign of self-knowledge, not a lack of ambition.

Build a personal support system that also evolves#

Just as the job's skills change at each level, so does the support a leader needs: an engineering manager benefits from peer managers to compare notes with; a director or VP increasingly needs peers outside the company (an executive coach, a peer group of leaders at similar companies) because the internal peer set with genuinely comparable context shrinks at the top of the ladder. Leaders who don't rebuild their support system at each level often end up isolated exactly when the ambiguity of the role is at its highest.

Pros#

Naming the specific loss at each transition prevents a leader from misdiagnosing normal transition friction as evidence they're failing or in the wrong role.
Treating each level as a genuinely distinct skill set (not just "more management") sets realistic expectations for the learning curve after a promotion, rather than expecting immediate fluency.
Framing continued climbing as a deliberate choice, not a default, helps leaders find the level that actually fits their strengths and interests rather than over-climbing out of pure momentum.

Cons#

Consciously "giving up" a skill you're genuinely good at is emotionally difficult even when you understand it intellectually, and some leaders struggle with this transition repeatedly across multiple levels.
The temporary competence dip after each transition is real and can affect performance reviews, team confidence, or the leader's own confidence during a period when they're objectively still learning the new role.
Rebuilding a support system at each level (especially finding external peers at the VP/CTO level) takes deliberate effort that's easy to deprioritize under the workload of the new role itself.

Alternatives#

Staying at a level long-term rather than continuing to climb - not really an "alternative" to this lesson so much as one of its valid conclusions: recognizing a level fits well and choosing to stay, developing depth rather than breadth, is a legitimate long-term career shape.
Moving back down a level (IC or a lower management tier) - sometimes the right call when a transition reveals a genuine mismatch, not a temporary dip; Fournier treats this as a real, if underused, option rather than a failure, especially when caught before serious damage to a team or org.
Lateral moves across functions (e.g., engineering management to product management) - some leaders find that what they actually enjoyed about a given level (e.g., a director's strategic scope) is available in a different functional path, not only by continuing up the engineering management ladder.

When to use it#

At every transition point in this subject's sequence - and proactively, before a promotion, to set realistic expectations about what will feel different and temporarily harder, rather than only retrospectively as an explanation after the fact.

When NOT to use it#

Don't use "this is just a normal transition dip" as a permanent excuse for genuinely poor performance in a new role - the framework explains an expected, temporary adjustment period, not an indefinite pass; if the dip doesn't resolve with real effort and time, that's a legitimate signal worth taking seriously, possibly pointing toward a level or role mismatch rather than a transition in progress.

Key takeaways / mental model#

Every step up this ladder trades a skill you're expert in for one you're a beginner at - expect the competence dip, name specifically what you're giving up, and treat "how far do I climb" as a deliberate choice about what energizes you, not a default assumption that higher is always better.

Self-check questions#

Pick two adjacent levels from this subject (e.g., tech lead to manager, or director to VP). What specific skill does the leader give up, and what new skill replaces it?
Why does Fournier argue that success at one management level is a weak predictor of success at the next level, rather than assuming the skills simply compound?
Describe what the "temporary competence dip" looks like concretely for someone moving from engineering manager to manager-of-managers, using the coaching-versus-direct-feedback example from this lesson.
What would make it a genuinely good decision to stop climbing at a given level, rather than a failure of ambition? What would make it a bad decision to keep climbing anyway?

References#

The Manager's Path (Camille Fournier), Chapter 9: "Culture" and the book's Conclusion.