What’s A Challenge You Faced Early On?

One of the biggest challenges early on was learning how to manage others.

As I gained experience, I became a technical lead on one of my projects, gaining responsibility for the engineering direction of the product we were building. I had to lead team members who had been at the company longer than me, and had more technical experience than me, which was an adjustment, especially coming out of college.

Figuring out how to navigate that dynamic and build trust took some time.

FOLLOW UP: How Did You Manage Those Relationships?

The main principle I followed was always asking for advice and making sure everyone's opinion is heard. I realized there were many topics where others would have far more acquired knowledge than I would as an early-career professional. Asking a lot of questions helps in those situations.

Also, you need to get to know people before you can have any sort of professional relationship with them, let alone manage them. Taking the time to get to know everyone’s strengths made it much easier to delegate tasks in a way that played to those strengths and helped the team work more effectively.