The path to Strategic Leadership

As a first-line manager, you directly assign work to individual contributors, measure their progress and deliver immediate results - e.g. specific product features, project releases and architectural designs. A lot of time is spent in directly managing these contributors within the team.

As a second-level manager, you're no longer directly managing individual engineers; instead you manage multiple teams, steering each towards success and eventual independence. At the end, your first-line managers are managing their teams autonomously and only highlighting risks and issues to you.

At the vice-president level, you work as an Executive. You're no longer steering teams directly. Instead, your job is to plant a flag and direct your teams towards that distant vision; create an environment that facilitates individuals in doing their jobs; and to identify specific bumps in the road ahead of time to smooth the way.

A specific algorithm for achieving VP-level success:

1. Set the overall Vision
2. Define Strategic objectives and Tactical goals (i.e. the criteria for success)
3. Measure key metrics to track progress towards those goals
4. Identify core blockers (people, processes, tools), current and future
5. Focus on achieving a solid, high-performance team