Accidentally in Code

I watched an IC have a lightbulb moment: they’re a manager now. Running agents in parallel, giving direction, deciding what’s worth doing. Being responsible for what ships, without doing it all themself. My job is giving them the pieces of management that are useful right now.

Not how to run a 1:1.

How to think one level up, and systematically. Not the bug, the bug class. Not the problem directly in front, the one that comes next.

The ones asking for this help are the ones who still feel responsible for what ships. How do I do this responsibly? I see pro-AI-development and cognitive surrender being conflated as the same position. They aren’t. The work is building systems where you can be responsible for what you shipped without being in the details of it.

ICs spend – or at least used to – more time focused on the thing immediately ahead and as such are biased to notice that. It made sense when that took a while, but now it can be faster, the timelines are compressed – or they can be, if things are working well.

Managers encode judgement through process and relationships. Relationships build judgement 1:1 – and that’s valuable – but process is how judgement scales.

Scaling agents has really tapped into something for me, and it’s all the skills I used to use when I was scaling teams – many of the same ideas showing up at different times. Also things other people used to do and I never got into the depths of – I’m spending a lot of time in CI, lately. I never did that before.

The human parts of management are important. Of course they were. But the people who thought managers did nothing but go to meetings always seemed to miss the pieces those meetings (and documents, and nudges, and questions) moved forward. Which was finding the things that were lossy – whether partial processes, or missing guardrails or understanding – and causing them to be filled in directly or indirectly.

If you want to move at speed with these new tools, you can’t have 8 people on the team moving as fast as possible and one person trying to figure that out. You certainly can’t expect that from the person who has so many direct reports they can’t physically meet with them each week. Every IC needs to learn how to do it for themselves, and then collectively, so the team can move faster together.

Management is learnable. When you scale a team you build a layer of management underneath you. You bring people in, or you lift people up, and you train them. You take the values of the team and encode them into process, because process is how you get multiple people to do the same thing consistently.

ICs aren’t being asked to do this. They’re being asked – told – to go faster. But this is how teams go faster. This is the work good managers always did. Now they need to scale that work earlier, with people who didn’t sign up for it deliberately.

If we’d ever really been clear on what a manager does, perhaps this aspect of management would be more defined and it would be easier. Oh well.