How did your role as a technology expert change when you entered your first software leadership position?

It is that transition from all hands on to partial hands on and partial management that is toughest....our brains are still wired towards doing everything ourselves....learning and perfecting the art of delegation, and more importantly building trust on the people you delegate things to, takes time....It is important to realize and to be mindful during this transition that we do not turn into micro-management and build the trust factor consciously...Leadership means different for everyone...for me, it was the sense of responsibility ensuring a business requirement is met through our solutions and implementation that initially sent me into paranoia, until I gained confidence through the first few implementations to say to myself, "You got this"...

When you are in delivery execution, it’s easier to relate directly to the problem, experiment with solutions yourself or within the team, and share practical viewpoints.

In a leadership role, however, you need to adapt to a very different mode of operating—where you must interpret signals from multiple sources, connect the dots across teams, make sense of incomplete information, and provide direction based on experience, context, and judgment. It’s about being the connector, the integrator, and the sense‑maker, not just the problem solver.

There may be a couple different responses depending on your software development process. I’ll start with Agile software development response. With Agile, this is more similar to mechanical hardware development where we rapidly produce hardware as soon as a concept is available. The same is true with Agile software development. As soon as we have functional code, we put this in the customers hands to test and see how close we got to meeting their technical requirements then make changes or throw the code away and start over if we are too far off from the target. The same with rapid prototype hardware. Sometimes we just need to start over based on form, fit, or function.

Now let’s look at traditional software development where people work for months to have a final product to put in front of the customer. What we’ve noticed, we never hit the target let alone the bullseye. It’s been so bad that we’ve accepted software that is subpar because we had too much invested to throw it away or start over.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have follow up questions.

This is a tough question. The biggest change is that it required shifting from doing to imagining (vision) how solutions can be delivered better, both effectively and efficiently.

You firstly work with your team to create a tech strategy. Also delegate the tech expert position to someone on your team. Drive for technology change by enabling your team. Question them on why and how , nudge them in the right direction, but resist your nature to jump in.