The Art of Leading Without a Manual: Lessons from Managing 30+ Engineers

Three years ago, I inherited a team that looked suspiciously like a collection of brilliant individuals who'd rather debug code than attend meetings. Sound familiar? As someone who once convinced his family to let him ride a motorcycle by sheer persistence over "1 year, 9 months and 22 days," I knew this would require a different approach than the standard management playbook.
The breakthrough came when I stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room and started being the most curious instead. During our first team retrospective, instead of dictating process improvements, I asked a simple question: "What's the one thing that makes you want to throw your laptop out the window?" The responses were brutally honest and incredibly insightful. Our deployment pipeline was slower than Mumbai traffic during monsoon, and our code review process had more bottlenecks than the old RTO where I once got my license.
Here's what I learned about leading technical teams: they don't need a boss, they need a conductor. My job isn't to know every line of code or architect every solution. It's to remove obstacles, amplify their brilliance, and occasionally translate "this will take five minutes" into realistic timelines for stakeholders. When one of my engineers spent three days optimizing a query that improved system performance by 40%, I didn't question the time investment - I celebrated it in our all-hands meeting. Well worth the boxes of donuts for the team that week!
The real magic happens when you create space for people to be themselves while working toward something bigger. Whether it's implementing ISO 27001 compliance or delivering a critical client feature, success comes from understanding that every engineer has their own version of that perfectly timed motorcycle kick-start - you just need to give them room to find their rhythm. Today, our team delivery rate has improved by 35%, but more importantly, they actually look forward to our Monday stand-ups. Not bad for someone who "dislikes speaking with people, unless I really really like them."