Head of Frontend Development

The time has come.
That dreadful time that marked the end of coding in my career.
I am now the the Head of Frontend Development.

What does it mean?

I still have to figure it out completely, for sure it means much more things to do, most of them not code related.

Mostly dealing with people, making sure they are motivated and focused on the right things, and ensuring the quality of the products is always high.

Am I ready?

Yes.
If I wasn’t my employers wouldn’t have promoted me.
Furthermore, it’s quite some months that I’m doing kinda the same job, only the name of the position is changed.

Ok, but am I actually ready?

Weeeeell…
The impostor sindrome is behind the corner and I’m definitely out of my comfort zone.
I thought it was just a change of name, but the duties were kinda the same. And probably it’s true, but the label itself put a lot of pressure on me, even unconsciously.
For sure there are still a lot of things that I have to learn, but I’m taking it as a new challenge, probably the biggest challenge since a while.

I know for a fact that I’m still making mistakes, but I need to understand what are my weaknesses and how to address them.

• Prioritize tasks: as said there are a lot of things to do, also I have a bunch of old tasks that have been piled because of urgencies and those have to be dequeued too. I surely need to understand how many things I have to do and be able to pick the right thing to do at the right time.
• Delegate: from now on (actually it’s been like this for quite some time) I won’t be able to code as much as I’d like, this means that I’ll have to tell other people what to do and how, also about topics that have been my sole responsibility so far, like deployment scripts.
• Mind my own business: when someone asks anything I’ve always tried to be the one that answers, even when it’s a question with no direct addressee. I have to learn to wait for others to answer, mostly if I have other things to do (which always happens). Unless I’m the one mentioned, but even then it’s better to redirect the question to someone else that might be able to answer: more time for me, more responsibility (with a possible side effect of more motivation) to others, two birds with one stone.
• Study, a lot: this is almost a new field to me, at least with this perspective and scale, for sure my next readings won’t be about code anymore, at least not only about code, but about team management and leadership.
• Accept criticisms: luckily I’m already prepared on this, I’m rarely offended and always willing to improve myself, but I have to be ready to hear a lot more criticisms because I’ll surely do a lot of mistakes. The key is not giving up, understand which was the mistake and how to avoid it next time, and not feeling like a complete failure.
• Be listening but firm: I have to learn to be more authoritative, but without letting people down.
• Be in my place: I still need to find my place, but for sure there are things that are totally outside of my scope. Being the Head of Development doesn’t mean that I can do whatever I want, I still have duties, tasks and directions that are not decided by me. If I have ideas I have to find the right time and way to tell them.

Conclusions

This is already a lot to work on, I hope to be able to master all of them as soon as possible, even though for sure there will be many more points to add in the list of things to improve.