The road from individual contributor to technology executive is rarely a straight line. Mine ran from writing code at Ericsson to leading teams at startups to serving as CTO at syenah GmbH, and it came with plenty of lessons, some unexpected obstacles, and a fair amount of growth.
Since a lot of technical people want to move into leadership, I want to share what I have learned, the wins and the missteps that shaped how I lead.
Technical Excellence Is Just the Beginning
Like most engineering leaders, I started by chasing technical mastery. I spent years getting good at Java and C, taking pride in clean solutions and depth. That expertise gave me credibility and got me promoted early.
What I learned quickly is that the skills that make a great engineer are necessary but nowhere near sufficient for leadership. As my responsibilities grew, I had to build a whole new set of skills around people, communication, strategy, and the business.
The hardest adjustment was realizing that technical perfectionism, a virtue at the keyboard, becomes a liability in charge of others. Trading some of it for pragmatism, business needs, and the wellbeing of the team turned out to be essential.
The Leadership Learning Curve
My first leadership role was running a small development team at Ericsson. I was technically ready and still managed to make nearly every classic first-time-manager mistake:
- Kept coding heavily instead of enabling the team
- Handed out answers instead of asking questions
- Avoided the hard conversations about performance
- Did not delegate
- Underrated how much clear communication mattered
Those early stumbles taught me that leadership needs deliberate practice, reflection, and mentorship, the same as any technical skill. I started taking management training seriously, found mentors outside my technical comfort zone, and built habits for examining how I was actually doing as a leader.
The Crucial Middle Phase
Between team lead and executive sits an awkward middle stretch, the Engineering Manager and Director of Engineering range, where you are neither purely technical nor fully strategic. It demands that you stay technically relevant while building broader business and leadership skill at the same time.
At Bolt I wrestled with this. First I leaned too hard into technical contribution at the expense of strategy and relationships. Then I overcorrected, going all-in on strategy and losing touch with the technical detail. Finding the middle took conscious effort and regular recalibration.
This phase also forced a more serious grasp of how organizations actually work: navigating competing priorities and building influence that does not depend on authority. Those skills carried straight into the executive roles that followed.
The CTO Perspective
Moving into the CTO seat shifted the view again. Beyond technology and people, the role asks for a genuinely enterprise-wide lens: how technology enables strategy, manages risk, and builds advantage.
At syenah that has meant holding several horizons at once:
- Making sure current products meet customers' needs today
- Building technical foundations for medium-term growth
- Exploring emerging technology that could reshape our space
- Growing the organizational muscle that sustains innovation
The most valuable skill at this level turns out not to be technical knowledge or management technique, but translation: connecting strategy to implementation, turning customer needs into a roadmap, and helping non-technical stakeholders see both the value and the limits of technology.
Lessons for Aspiring Technology Leaders
For engineers aiming at leadership, here is what I would pass on:
- Build people skills early: long before you need them, invest in team dynamics, communication, and emotional intelligence.
- Go wide, not just deep: keep your technical foundation, but deliberately expose yourself to other functions, business models, and industries.
- Find mentors who are honest: growth needs an outside view. Seek the people who tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to.
- Practice systems thinking: learn to see how parts of an organization interact and to spot patterns across areas that look unrelated.
- Define your leadership philosophy: get clear on the principles that guide your decisions, especially in the hard tradeoffs.
The Journey Continues
The most humbling part is that leadership development never finishes. Every new role, team, and challenge is another chance to refine your approach and stretch your range.
What keeps me going is the leverage: building teams and technology that solve real problems at scale. The challenges are big, and so is the satisfaction of watching a team do more than any one person could.
If you are early in your technical leadership journey, take on both the difficulty and the learning ahead. The path from engineer to technology leader is not easy, but for people set on growth and impact, it is deeply worth it.