How Reminders can Unleash Your Full Potential
4 March, 2022

Senior Engineering Manager at Plato HQ
IC to Management Transition
My transition from IC to manager happened very abruptly, and I was underprepared. I remember thinking, “how hard it can be” and only later realized that I made every possible mistake a new manager could make.
I know that many of those mistakes were avoidable, and what I came to understand was that many of the parts of management could be treated as an engineering discipline. Just like you write tests before you deploy your code, managers schedule one-on-ones to recognize minor issues before they grow. I found that once I started treating leadership similarly to an engineering discipline, many of my tasks were easier to maintain.
Tips for New Leaders
Maintaining a Healthy Calendar:
One of the aspects of my role I treat like an engineering discipline is the way I schedule my calendar. I assume that the ‘me’ who set up my calendar is smarter than the ‘me’ who has a meeting in five minutes – meaning once I schedule my calendar, I follow it religiously.
A recurring example I’ve noticed is that it’s easy for team members to skip a one-on-one. However, individuals schedule one-on-ones for specific reasons, usually important ones, and they should continue with the meeting. This principle relates to the Atul Gawande book, The Checklist Manifesto, where Atul puts heavy emphasis on his checklist and trusts it completely at the moment.
Creating the routine is the same as running; once you’ve run five miles once, it slowly becomes easier – once I create a routine, daily tasks and meetings become ingrained in my day.
Since managers have to focus on their own, as well as their reports workload, it can be difficult to remember all of the small tasks in a day. If you don’t set aside any reminders, you’re bound to forget. The simple act of trying to remember a task is cognitive load. Even if you only remember one simple thing, it’s still taking 5 or 10% of your brainpower – preventing you from focusing that energy on another task.
Streamlining the Transition to Manager:
I encountered many challenges during my transition to manager. I recommend that new managers follow these tips:
- Read any available resources about the role
- Set reminders for yourself to do tasks that easily fall through the cracks
- Perform a retrospective on your performance and adjust to your findings
- When something goes wrong, own the consequences and understand what you should do differently in the future
Discover Plato
Scale your coaching effort for your engineering and product teams
Develop yourself to become a stronger engineering / product leader
Related stories
26 May
Hiring 10x engineers is hard for most companies. It’s a tough battle out there for talent. So how should most companies approach building their team?

Vaidik Kapoor
VP Engineering - DevOps & Security at Grofers
24 May
Jord Sips, Senior Product Manager at Mews, shares his expertise on a common challenge for product managers – finding root causes and solutions.

Jord Sips
Senior Product Manager at Mews
16 May
Snehal Shaha, Lead Technical Program Manager at Momentive (fka SurveyMonkey), details her short-term technical strategy to unify processes among teams following an acquisition.

Snehal Shaha
Senior EPM/TPM at Apple Inc.
11 May
Tom Hill, Engineering Manager at Globality, Inc., shares how he works with a culturally diverse team based within a thirteen-hour time gap.

Tom Hill
Engineering Manager at Torii
9 May
Pavel Safarik, Head of Product at ROI Hunter, shares his insights on how to deal with disagreements about prioritization when building a product.

Pavel Safarik
Head of Product at ROI Hunter
You're a great engineer.
Become a great engineering leader.
Plato (platohq.com) is the world's biggest mentorship platform for engineering managers & product managers. We've curated a community of mentors who are the tech industry's best engineering & product leaders from companies like Facebook, Lyft, Slack, Airbnb, Gusto, and more.
