Engineering leadership involves four distinct skills: Technical, Operations, Product, and Strategy. Since no single person excels at all four, organizations should build complementary leadership teams, pairing a visionary CTO with a process-driven VP of Engineering.

Companies mistakenly bundle management with authority, forcing top performers onto a management track to gain influence. Separate them. Define management's role as coordination and context-sharing, allowing senior individual contributors to drive decisions without managing people.

To transition into management, engineers should prioritize gaining broad technical knowledge across disciplines. This breadth allows them to understand team-wide pain points, facilitate collaboration, and implement effective systems, rather than being the deepest expert in a single area.

Effective engineering leadership is like farming: growth isn't achieved by demanding it from the plants. Leaders should obsess over inputs—clear goals, sound strategy, team structure, and operational rigor—to create the conditions for great engineering to happen naturally.

A great tech lead provides a safety net without micromanaging. The analogy is a driving instructor who starts with their hands near a second steering wheel, ready to intervene, but gradually backs off as trust builds with the student. This approach gives engineers freedom to grow while ensuring the project stays on track.

Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.

Former BetterRx CEO Ben Clark sets the expectation that his leaders should be ahead of him 90% of the time, bringing him well-formed plans to critique rather than asking for direction. This empowers domain experts to truly own their space and frees the CEO to focus on high-level strategy and support.

Better products are a byproduct of a better team environment. A leader's primary job is not to work on the product, but to cultivate the people and the system they work in—improving their thinking, decision-making, and collaboration.

Stop defining a manager's job by tasks like meetings or feedback. Instead, define it by the goal: getting better outcomes from a group. Your only tools to achieve this are three levers: getting the right People, defining the right Process, and aligning everyone on a clear Purpose.