About this episode

The episode explores the challenges of transitioning from an engineer to a technical leader, emphasizing the importance of delegation and understanding business dynamics.

What if leadership isn’t about managing people, but about owning decisions? Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com — the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. I’m joined by Michael Di Prisco, who describes himself as “a software engineer struggling to realize that he became a tech leader”. Michael was pretty reluctant to become an engineering manager and leave the keyboard, but he started moving outside his comfort zone one step at a time. He gradually found a balance where he still writes code, but it is not expected of him. We explore how authority and responsibility actually work inside a team. He explains why every engineer should understand the business, and what changed when he started delegating code instead of doing everything himself. That shift did not slow the team down. The quality of their coding was becoming better, and people could focus on what they wanted to do more. We also get into documenting technical debt and how his team reached a point where they solved more debt than they created. If you are thinking about the move into…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Horner

Guest: Michael Di Prisco

Topics covered

• leadership
• technical leadership
• engineering management
• team dynamics
• delegation
• technical debt

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