{"id":3643,"date":"2024-03-26T17:55:30","date_gmt":"2024-03-26T23:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=3643"},"modified":"2024-03-26T17:55:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T23:55:30","slug":"new-adventures-same-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3643","title":{"rendered":"New adventures, same company"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I recently shifted roles at FusionAuth. Where I was previously head of developer relation (devrel), I&#8217;ve relinquished this role to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/tonyblank\/\">Tony Blank<\/a>, who is now leading that team. I can&#8217;t wait to see what Tony and the team do to help developers build on and learn about FusionAuth.<\/p>\n<p>But why did I switch roles? I&#8217;d been leading the devrel function for almost four years and built the team to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>two full time employees<\/li>\n<li>one part time contractor<\/li>\n<li>three agencies<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Last year, I took a long hard look at what I was doing and what I wanted to do.<\/p>\n<p>I noticed I didn&#8217;t want to be on a <a href=\"https:\/\/paulgraham.com\/makersschedule.html\">manager&#8217;s schedule<\/a> and didn&#8217;t want to spend a large chunk of my workday in meetings. I enjoyed the impact of the devrel team and am very proud of everyone who was a part of it.<\/p>\n<p>Yet I also noticed a pattern in my career. I have often:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>been hired in an IC role<\/li>\n<li>had an opportunity to take a management role, because the business needed it and I could do an okay job<\/li>\n<li>took the opportunity<\/li>\n<li>didn&#8217;t enjoy it but also didn&#8217;t see a way out<\/li>\n<li>started looking for a new job<\/li>\n<li>quit the company<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I can think of three times this has happened in the last decade.<\/p>\n<p>When I started to build out the devrel team at FusionAuth, especially when I was hiring the full-time employees in the last year or so, I communicated clearly to my managers that I&#8217;d build the initial team because I saw a business need. Devrel and market awareness go hand in hand and I think the latter is what FusionAuth needs right now.<\/p>\n<p>But I was also clear that I wanted to hand team management to someone who cares about that as a discipline. I&#8217;ve learned enough about myself to know that I like some parts of people management, but that I don&#8217;t compare well with others working toward mastery of that craft.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m happy to report that my managers at FusionAuth heard me. They were willing to allow me to hire someone who has built out a great devrel team in the past and who really loves to do so; that would be Tony. (<a href=\"https:\/\/fusionauth.io\/blog\/fusionauth-funding\">Raising our round<\/a> helped with this too.)<\/p>\n<p>So, where does that leave me? My new title is principal product engineer. What I&#8217;ll be doing is high impact individual contributor (IC) work. Combining my knowledge of <a href=\"https:\/\/ciamweekly.substack.com\/\">CIAM<\/a>, my understanding of the company based on my tenure, and my software skills, I&#8217;ll be working on processes, code, and integrations to help solve FusionAuth&#8217;s business problems.<\/p>\n<p>At a company growing as fast as we are, there are always bumps to smooth out. Because of my history and skillset, I&#8217;m a good person to help. The first thing I&#8217;m doing is building out a training program to help employees sell more effectively; it&#8217;s been fun to evaluate and select a learning management system, create the curriculum, and build out the training modules.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll miss some pieces of devrel, but I expect to continue to do some devrel-esque tasks. For example, there are several long-form guides and example applications that I can&#8217;t wait to write. In fact, building out the training has unearthed holes in our documentation that I can&#8217;t wait to fill.<\/p>\n<p>When I look back, I often spun out of a company because I didn&#8217;t see a way out of a management role. This is because managers are among the most highly paid employees. Once I was promoted, I didn&#8217;t think that my superiors, who were in some cases the owners of the company, would see a place for me. I wasn&#8217;t sure there was a high impact IC role at these companies.<\/p>\n<p>But I made a mistake. I didn&#8217;t talk to them about alternatives. Part of this was due to my immaturity but a larger part was due to my fear and distrust. After all, if I mentioned I wasn&#8217;t happy managing a team, but that was what the business needed, I feared <strong>I<\/strong> wouldn&#8217;t be needed. But jumping to this conclusion without discussing options removed any agency from my managers. It is possible that I could have moved laterally within the company or found another path forward.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m ashamed that I didn&#8217;t trust them enough to explain how I was feeling and discuss the job shift I wanted to make.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m proud I had this tough conversation at FusionAuth. I was able to because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I had seen the pattern enough times to know that I could do management for a while but would eventually become unhappy enough to leave<\/li>\n<li>I knew I didn&#8217;t want to leave because of the team, the problem and the overall opportunity<\/li>\n<li>I was in a unique position, having been there for most of the growth yet not having a C level role<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;d seen other folks in difficult situation be treated fairly<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This conversation could have resulted in a departure for me if there was no budget or need for a high level IC role. The fact that it didn&#8217;t have that result gives me hope that there is a path, and a budget, for non-managerial technical leadership, even at smaller companies. In fact, I&#8217;m hoping this inspires other folks at FusionAuth, who may want to increase their impact without managing people, to stick around.<\/p>\n<p>I also look forward to solving tons of problems as we keep growing.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s to new adventures!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently shifted roles at FusionAuth. Where I was previously head of developer relation (devrel), I&#8217;ve relinquished this role to Tony Blank, who is now leading that team. I can&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devrel","category-fusionauth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3643"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3646,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3643\/revisions\/3646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}