So you want to become a leader? Review my lessons learned from the top leaders and roles in technology

While working at Microsoft as a Cloud Solution Architect in Data Platform, one of the things we constantly thrive for is improving ourselves and our customers by spreading our energy and passion. A way to improve this is by focusing on our growth path to see which skills we lack and how we can improve those. One of those skills for me is leadership, and how we can grow towards managing a team and reaching new heights. Just think of managing a team of Architect, managing a Product team or even managing the technical strategy of Microsoft (=CTO).

In previous articles, I already defined the core values (see them here) that I think a leader should express (Focus, Inclusion, Commitment, Exploration and Listening). But what are the skills that others have that we still need to learn? This is what I will tackle in the following few lines.

Do you want to instantly see the results of this article? Skip to the summary

Discovery

I started by discovering what the current leaders of today are doing and focusing on, as well as some job descriptions that fit with the profiles of leaders. In here I will list up some leaders and job descriptions that fit my interest for finding skills regarding "technical leaders" rather than the normal "business leaders" in a summary kind of style.

Leaders

Kevin Scott - CTO Microsoft

Summary

Keep on creating prototypes with your own products
It takes ~9 months to know what you're doing in the role before being able to contribute
Make yourself vulnerable and meet with as many people as you can meet with in "sponge-mode"
Don't throw your opinion around before you are well informed
Responsibilities
Integrating all the products into one coherent whole
Make good products that customers want and that are reliable, fast and meet their expectations of functionality
Expressing the technology strategy (which things do we need to be building?, how should we build them?, …)
Through memos, talking to developers, reviewing projects

Career Path

References

Michael Curtis - VP Engineering @ Airbnb

Summary

2 market (supply & demand) problem solved by tightly managing the community till there is enough supply and demand for the hockey-stick.
Engineers are now "business process owners" who want a problem and be in charge of solving it.

Career Path

References

Job Postings

Chief Technical Advisor to the CTO

Help formulate and drive technical strategy
Lead team of advisors, PMs and developers focused on driving technology and cultural change
Run strategic initiatives, incubations and programs
Build a product vision and roadmap

Principal Development Manager

lead, mentor and grow a team of engineers and architects
Collaborate with UX, marketing, 3rd party
Align with SLT on strategy
Drive initiatives around the company, partnering with other segments
Skills Needed:
Business Leadership – Lead consumer and services business
Engineering leadership – Manage engineering pool (hire, grow, manage) and be a role model for technical excellence and customer quality
Drive – Passion to turn vision into detailed plans and execute against complex plans
Collaborate – Partner with product teams to manage dependencies, jointly deliver updates, and continuously improve our engineering capabilities
Communications & planning – Clearly communicate engineering roadmap, backlog, and team updates across the organization
Culture – Contribute to a team culture that embraces diversity and inclusion and makes your team awesome place to work

Group Program Manager

Lead PMs focused on driving adoption, satisfaction and removing customer barriers
Set product strategy
Lead team through all phases of product definition and delivery
Accountable for customer satisfaction, product success and business results
Identify revenue and margin objectives
Establish relationship with Open Source Community
Partner with Engineering, sales, marketing and partners to ensure all functions are aligned

Summarizing

Looking at what we found in the discovery phase, a red line can be found of skills that are needed to be in a leadership position:

Customer Obsession

The most clear one is as always Customer Obsession, without customer satisfaction your product will die and nothing will come forth from it. Which is why you need to know the ins and outs of your customer, their satisfaction, their needs and their opinions

Product Quality

Another important thing that is often overlooked, or neglected and that is in combination with Customer Obsession is the quality of the product. If your product is not reliable, fast or has a wrong UX, customers will not be retained. Resulting in a high Customer Acquisition cost (CAC) but even a lower Lifetime Value (LTV).

Therefore you need to make sure as a leader that you know which KPIs define your product and customer obsession. Without these you will not expire the growth that you expected and your product will experience doom sooner than later.

Product / Technology Strategy & Roadmap

As a leader, you will need to put a clear strategy and roadmap for the product (as a VP in engineering) or for the company (as a CTO, more horizontally focused) that can be communicated to the outer world, but also towards the inner parts of an organization.

Large scale organizations are like a Container Ship. Once you steer them, the effect is not instantly visible. Therefore you need to do everything you can to speed this up, because the speed that an organization runs on, will define the speed to market that you can achieve.

Empower your team

The last point I want to summarize from this is your team. As often thought, you are not in charge of them! They are in charge of you. Your team is the one that will deliver you your success, so you should treat them like it. Listen to them, empower them and give them the freedom they need to be successful. Because in the end, with a good team you can take on the world.