Ask HN: Just made Director, now what?

Being a director means you have more responsibilities, but if you are too focused on trying to make everyone happy, you could set yourself up for a burn out.

Identify key individuals to help you (usually lead engineers), and give them your trust to do their job.

Focus on larger initiatives, give both positive and negative feedback, encourage healthy competition, and always be forgiving. Always be approachable, but never let them take your presence for granted.

Ultimately, you will find a larger reward when you take time developing individual relationships. They will appreciate your attention, and in turn, you will have direct influence over them.

My recommendation, learn how to translate "unquantifiable" ideas to quantifiable ones. You can do this through a simple tool called an "OKR", which stands for "Objectives, and Key Results".

OKRs are generally built for quarterly runs. No need to stick to that. But come up with four objectives, split them each into six or so actionable items. So those actionable items can be split up into tasks, sprints, etc..

At that point, you will have quite a bit of work set up, and it will be easily measured. Take the percentage completed of each of the tasks, which make up the percent completed of the Key Result, and then the percentage of the Key Results completed make up how far along in your objective you are.

The objectives should spread across several different domains that you're directing, and your priorities should take care of what goes in there.

Take a good amount of measurements on those, do Gap Analysis' often, to find out why you overshot, undershot, etc., and keep track of that information. Do Root Cause Analysis' often as well, so you can find out what is really going on.

The crux of it all really depends on what you're willing to do with your team, and how accountable you're all willing to be held. Without their backing on your objectives, it'll be a bit more difficult. So if they understand what it is that you're trying to accomplish, and they see your leadership (i.e. owning up to all mistakes, and sharing all accomplishments), they will back you. But the keys to that are understanding the goals of the objectives (not just the objectives, but the reason that they're up there).

If you can do those things, you'll find it very easy to manage.

Other more specific things might be setting up controls so that you can easily audit the SDLC: get "sensors" and "measures" in place. Sensors would be something like a CI server, automated testing, security unit tests, post deployment tests, code sniffing, static code analysis, dynamic code analysis, regular fuzz testing, ensuring that your environment is locked down with file integrity checking, track third party tools that are in use for any known vulnerabilities, get software bill of materials (while you're at it), get a known authorized hardware list, get a known authorized software list, have a monitoring system for when these are violated, and get the response time down to 1 - 24 hours.

The measures will be something like: * adding a benevolent unauthorized machine to the network. * adding benevolent unauthorized software to an unauthorized machine in the network * adding benevolent unauthorized software to an authorized machine in the network * make a change to a file that does not decrease the security of the environment (ex: change from 10 char password complexity to 14 char password complexity), and see if the file integrity check finds it.

Basically for every sensor, you want to have a measure that checks it, otherwise you won't know if you have it set up properly, or if it is broken.

(1) Andrew Grove's "High Output Management", it's easy to read: https://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove... (2) Manager Tools "Basics" podcasts, especially on 1x1s and feedback: https://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics

There's a hell of a lot to learn outside of these things, but I think they're a good start.

Here's what I intuitively understood that made it easier for me to get the job and be broadly successful:

- You're the public face of your group, you're essentially responsible for championing your team to those in the organization as a whole.

- You need to be listening to those other groups and thinking about what your group can do to help

- Aggregate all those things you hear at a more global level and think about how you can gather interested parties (from all areas) to solve them

Specific example, we weren't closing as many software development projects because our sales teams didn't know what we could do.

First, I worked with some of the sales guys to create some training to help them pick up on the signs that "this might be a dev project" and "this could be worth a lot of money".

Second, I got in on a lot of RFPs and proposals to see what was being asked of us. I refactored the initial training to target the patterns we were seeing.

Third, and this may not be applicable, I actually became a part of proposals and pitches. Nobody was bringing the tech folks in.

Here's what I didn't think about/had to work on:

- HR and management strategy at a much higher level. Knowing impending cuts are coming, the knots that come with having to be part of firing or laying off people.

- Instead of keeping a smaller number of people that you work with closely happy and interested, you're trying to keep them AND their employees interested

- Managing managers is totally different than non-managers

- Budgeting strategy. Fighting to get training dollars, head count, new hardware (that wasn't really an issue), etc. It's kind of a zero sum game and politics will absolutely come in to play here. Maybe more so than anywhere else.

- So many meetings.

- It's a lot harder to feel like you've accomplished anything at the end of the day. You need to start measuring by weeks and months.

- So many meetings, again.

- You need to get people interested in your ideas for change. You really have to sell them in a new way to every person you talk to.

- You better have ideas for change.

- it's not all about you. Make sure that you piblically represent your team, not yourself.

- politics isn't above you. Learn how to be effective with your peers. At the director levels even your friends can become your competition.

- appreciate that your decisions impact people around you and the company.

- study budgeting. Know where the money goes.

- when tough times come, know where you will cut. If the place is toxic, learn how to stockpile cash or human fodder.