How to Succeed as a New Tech Manager

Navigate the first 30 days as a new tech manager with tools to ease imposter feelings and transition quickly into your new role, while making an immediate impact.

Set and document short-term goals, and track progress with data-driven feedback. Adjust behaviors, rewrite goals when needed, and improve confidence and learning in a new tech manager role.

Organize information with a simple high-level file folder system to make meeting notes and agendas quickly retrievable, enabling self-service access and faster decision-making.

Accelerate learning in a new tech manager role by listening first, conducting a listening tour, and gathering documentation and KPIs to align with the organization's priorities, tools, and values.

Build cross-functional relationships across silos to enable collaboration and product success. Start with a solid foundation: get to know your team, build trust, listen, and tackle hard conversations together.

Discover how to become an expert on yourself by identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and productive patterns to improve productivity, communication, and influence as a new tech manager.

Ask stakeholders what success looks like, then align your goals with theirs. Start conversations with direct reports, peers, and cross-functional partners to enable collaboration and early wins.

Become an expert on your product by using it yourself, researching competitors, and gathering customer feedback, to inform decisions and clearly explain capabilities.

Assess your product's performance and security quickly by reviewing metrics, charts and dashboards, customer feedback, and incident management practices to inform a data-driven roadmap and risk decisions.

Learn best practices to deliver quick wins from days 31 to 60 as a new tech manager, focusing on rapid impact and achieving initial results.

Identify multiple customers beyond the buyer, including senior managers, directors, peers, and cross-functional teams. Create customer profiles to understand their priorities and track requests with a simple spreadsheet.

Provide regular, actionable feedback to direct reports to drive results while understanding what motivates them and adjusting workloads to support personal circumstances.

Coach early and transparently address underperformance with data-backed feedback, documenting metrics and consequences to guide improvement and determine when to escalate to formal performance management.

Assess your team's skills with a comprehensive skills matrix to uncover a single point of failure, mitigate succession risk, and identify growth opportunities for future leaders in software development.

Create an out of office coverage plan before extended leave by assigning owners, detailing tasks and activities, sharing the plan with the team, and reviewing your calendar to ensure continuity.

Learn to identify and document risks with input from your team and industry observations, assess likelihood and impact, and develop a clear mitigation strategy using a practical worksheet.

Plan for risk using a real world example, identify the assignee, prioritize threats by likelihood and impact, and mitigate with refactoring and transparent scoring.

Focus on day 60 to 90 as you solidify your comfort in the tech manager role, building strategies, habits, and tools to boost productivity and deliver results.

Learn to use calendar color coding to prioritize tasks, align your time with job expectations, and manage changes by prioritizing red critical events and delegating as needed.

Use your calendar to protect time for administrative tasks, create daily appointments, and add focus time to reduce stress and balance your work and personal life.

Facilitate efficient meetings with a clear agenda, pre-work, and asynchronous review to reduce time and boost team throughput. Start on time, end at 20 minutes, and document action items.

Maximize meeting productivity by pre-checking attendance necessity and requesting an agenda; delegate attendance to direct reports when possible. Engage thoughtfully, provide accurate follow-ups later, and commit to dated next steps.

Develop strong people leadership by building emotional intelligence, embracing diversity, inclusion and belonging, and fostering psychological safety so teams feel included and can share ideas freely.

Tech managers sustain their expertise by leveraging internal documentation, training, books, magazines, blogs, mentorship, internet alerts, conferences, and networking to stay current.

Invest in your team's career development by exploring career paths, creating plans with short-term goals, and monitoring progress with regular feedback and cross-role project experiences.

Learn to make inclusive, transparent, data-driven decisions using decision scorecards that weight criteria, document discussions, invite multiple teams, and disqualify options that fail must-have criteria.

Explore best practices for managing teams and starting a new role as a tech manager, with the attached resource document for advanced topics during your first 90 days.