For years, I prided myself on being the go-to individual contributor—always hands-on and in control of every detail. I believed that to truly build something great, I needed to master every facet of my work. I wondered, “Why trade my hands-on skills for a role that’s just about delegation?” But after my experience at an early-stage startup, I’ve had a change of heart. I now see management as the highest-leverage tool to scale my impact—a way to amplify my abilities.
The Old Me: Bullish on the IC Track
Before diving into the startup world, I cut my teeth at companies like Meta and Instacart. In those environments, deep technical expertise was the currency of success. I had multiple chances to step into management—but I turned them down. I was driven by the ambition to one day build my own company, and I believed that true success meant understanding every detail:
- Fundamentals: I wanted to know how things tick because a deep, fundamental understanding offers a significant competitive edge.
- Ability to Build: I worried that transitioning to management would make me overly reliant on others, compromising my ability to build things independently.
- Control Over Career: As an individual contributor, my growth was directly under my control. In management, however, progress often hinges on team dynamics and external market forces.
Key Realization
Everything changed when I found myself in a chaotic, fast-paced environment of a startup. I had a key realization:
Despite having the know-how, I simply didn’t have the time to execute every idea personally.
Here’s why:
- Time is the Ultimate Resource: There’s only so much time in a day and so many key strokes I can make. I quickly realized that my personal bandwidth was the most significant limiting factor. In fact, my desire to build everything myself left me unable to spend my time on higher leverage actions like thinking – ensuring what we built was the highest ROI.
- Step Function Efficiency: The only way to overcome this constraint was to improve my efficiency by a step function. I needed a tool—or a system—that could transform a two-week task like building a staging environment into a two-hour process, boosting efficiency by over 90%. Improving my skills and knowledge as an IC would only improve my efficiency incrementally.
- Building a System. Like most problems in technology, the solution is to build a repeatable, scalable system that could multiply my productivity and impact 10x. It just so happens that the system involves people and teams.
Team Systems: A Factory Analogy
Think of building a factory. Initially, you leverage your unique expertise to create a prototype. Once that product proves its value, you secure funding, build a production system, and scale exponentially.
- Leverage unique domain knowledge to identify a market gap.
- Invest personal time to create and validate a market demand of a proof-of-concept product.
- Secure funding from investors once product-market fit is achieved.
- Construct a 'factory'—your team—to scale production from a handful of products to thousands.
- Continuously measure results and scale further if demand persists.
. Here’s how this analogy maps onto teams and management:
- The market demand is the company’s need for impact
- The product is the deliverables that your team produces
- The factory is your team
- The investors are your bosses that dictate headcount
Here’s a concrete example from my Instacart career:
- Unique Knowledge: Recognize a key opportunity—such as improving delivery speed from a five-hour window to a 1:50 PM ETA.
- Proof of Concept: Invest your own time to develop and validate the concept through a proof-of-concept.
- PMF: Demonstrate significant impact through experiments, confirming that the idea can provide continued impact to the company
- Funding. Pitch the concept to your leadership, outlining the headcount and resources needed to build a dedicated team.
- Team Building: Invest a one-off cost in assembling the right team, then move on to identify and solve the next critical problem.
This factory mindset helped me see that by stepping into management, I wasn’t just giving up on my individual skills; I was finding a way to scale them. By building a system I could focus on leveraging my unique knowledge to push the boundary and let the system manage the known problems and continue driving value without me being there.
Mini-CEO Mindset
The process mirrors a CEO's journey: validate the idea, secure funding, build and empower a team, and then iterate on new opportunities.
Since building my own startup is an eventual goal of mine, I’m excited that I’m able to to develop the following skills within my current environment:
- Identifying Product-Market Fit: Pinpoint key areas within the company where your impact can be maximized.
- Effective Selling: Articulate the value of your initiatives to gain support from stakeholders and funders.
- System Design: Design organizational structures and workflows that streamline operations and drive consistent results.
Final Thoughts
Embracing management has not meant sacrificing my technical skills—it’s been about amplifying them. By building systems and empowering teams, I'm unlocking levels of impact that I could only dream of as an individual contributor.
For me, choosing management isn’t just a career move—it’s a strategic decision to overcome the limits of personal time and unlock a new level of efficiency. Management is about building a high output system that can increase the magnitude of your impact in delivering valuable products to market. That’s exactly what being a CEO is about.