The reality is, however, that at some point this doesn't scale and despite my best efforts to continue learning new technology, there are just some things that I don't know yet.
I am at a jumping off point in my career where I will have to start managing larger organizations, including organizations where I am just not familiar with the tech/domain.
I'm being hired because the bulk of my experience is applicable to the role, but, I can already foresee there are blind spots that I have that will make this job challenging.
At the moment, my first order of business will be to leverage my network to hire people that I can have at least some confidence in are competent in these areas.
Any tips on what to do here? From the strategic to the day-to-day managing of engineers, what are some things I can do so that I don't fall flat on my face?
Focus on the basics first. Know what success is and strive for that before drilling down into any technical junk. Here is what I did different job:
1. I did nothing for the first two weeks. I observed operations and talked to people. I looked at how people worked, observed personalities, observed personal performance, and looked for failures. I tried to find as many gaps and problems as I could and refused to jump in with solutions.
2. I wrote a new help desk ticket application from scratch and launched it within 2 weeks.
3. After a month in the job I moved people around. This was partially forced on me. I threw out seniority in some cases to ensure the correct personalities were in the correct positions. This meant I had to fire my second in command and promote somebody to replace him.
4. I focused on only two things: improvements to customer service and productivity. Before the new ticket system came online we had 125 open tickets. WTF. My goal was to get down to 20 open tickets. My boss's goal, which I guess is all that really matters, was to get down to 0 open tickets. We eventually did it, but we had to focus on customer service and productivity.
5. Reward your high achievers. This is much harder than it sounds. In a fast moving operational environment your top performers tend to get worked to death, because you know they are more dependable. That is so not fair, but it is what happens.
This was a temporary job. It ended and I went back to being a software developer. In reflection I was only moderately successful. I should have been a much better manager, but I was too busy being a technician because I lacked trust and faith in several of my subordinate managers. If management is doing everybody else's job then they aren't doing theirs.
A large part of that management failure was reporting enterprise failures to the VIPs. The VIPs only wanted to hear from the team leader, me, which means I had to be personally engaged on the things they would shit themselves over. Next time I will create a dashboard of VIP concerns and order my subordinate managers to brief the VIPs so that I can strictly be a leader/administrator.
Sounds like you need to cut yourself a little slack? No one is hitting the ground running from the get go when they are first hired. You will learn the domain and gain more experience over time. Some day you will move to a new org and the process will start over again.
Find out how you are going to be measured, find out what success and failure are viewed as, regardless of whether or not you believe those are the correct metrics. Set in place the routines and disciplines in yourself and your staff to ensure that you are accurately recognized for your successes. In parallel, if you do believe that the metrics you’re being measured by are wrong, figure out how to change them within the organization.
I utterly failed to make the transition from individual contributor to corporate manager for a long time after it happened and it impacted my team (I kept trying to code when I should have delegated it to them) and wrecked my reputation across the corporation.
tl;dr: Figure out what success is perceived as and manage to that. If you want to change what success is perceived as, change that in the background while exceeding what the current metric is.