Chronicling My Journey from Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager

Introduction

I’ve recently accepted a position as a UX Engineering Manager after being an Individual Contributor at various companies for the last 10 years. I thought it might be interesting and useful to others if I chronicled my journey from IC to EM. I’ll be writing about my experiences, the challenges I face, and the lessons I learn along the way. This particular role is a new one for me, so I’m sure there will be a lot of learning and growing to do. It’s also a small team made up of junior and mid-level devs, so along with mentoring and coaching, I’ll also be doing a lot of hands-on work, which means this blog will also include some more technical code-related posts as well.

This is my first ever attempt at writing a blog. I hope I’m good about sticking with it.

A Little Background

I got my first job as a front-end developer in 2012 at Mission Media, a small creative agency in Baltimore, after interning there during my last semester of college. At Mission I had a great mentor named Michael Scherr, who was very patient with me and led me on the right path. After about a year I landed a job maintaining the website for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It was a crash courses in writing semantic HTML (for the SEO and accessibility benefits), DRY CSS (for the performance and maintenance aspects), and some simple JavaScript (for interactivity).

After three years, I was ready for something new and was able to get a job thanks to the help of another mentor, Ben Sterling, as an Interactive Developer at Crispin Porter Bogusky, working on projects for clients like Dominos, American Airlines, Ryder, and Fruit of the Loom. It was at CPB where I discovered my passion for pattern libraries and design systems, and focusing on the front of the front-end.

After another three years there I followed Ben to an R&D crowd-sourcing startup called Launch Forth where I helped to build out a pattern library for the user interface. I was only there a little over a year before they lost their funding and I landed at Envysion, a company that provides security camera services, where I focused on building out their online video platform. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it wasn’t a great fit and fortunately for me it didn’t take long for me to find a job at Regions Bank helping to launch a brand new bespoke design system.

At Regions, I worked with and eventually led a great team of UX Engineers, Designers, Researchers, Content Strategists, and Accessibility Experts creating a fully-fledged design system comprised of not only the components and patterns, but also the documentation, guidelines, and governance. I only left to chase a new opportunity in “big tech” (and a bigger paycheck) at Indeed, where I wanted to see how a company of that size built, maintained, and managed contributions to a design system.

It was during my time as a Team Lead at Regions where I started to consider the possibility of becoming an Engineering Manager as the next step in my career. Prior to that, in every job I ever had I was always happy just contributing code and knocking out my Jira tickets. I never thought I wanted to be a people manager. But as I started leading the Design System team, I realized that I was actually pretty good at it. I was able to help my team members grow and learn, and I had a knack for setting the project on a path that stretched out months and even years.

At Indeed I learned a lot about how a company of that size handles engineering management through reviews, 1:1s, and career growth. With no plans at this time to move toward management, I was still keeping mental notes on how it was done, at least at Indeed. Much to my surprise, after only a few months away, my old manager at Regions reached out to let me know that his team had grown too big, that he was looking to turn all of his team leads into managers of their teams, and to ask if I would be interested in returning to manage the Design System team. After a few hours of discussions about the role, I accepted the offer and am returning to Regions.

So here I am, doing a lot of reading and note taking and eager to get started. I’m excited to share my journey with you and hope you’ll find some useful tidbits here and there should you find yourself on a similar path.