Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Managers start by writing code
Start as an IC
The idea came from a listening tour. Team members valued the agency but wanted help with prioritization, and wanted fewer layers of review. Supporting people is a heavy responsibility, so a new manager gets maker time first to learn the code base or product.
Building rapport
It builds rapport. New managers often arrive and reach for the manager toolbox. Learning what it is like to be an engineer and teammate first goes a long way.
Using the product
Using the product daily matters too: dashboards alone lose the feel of it. A leader who had last shipped production code at Meta in 2017 used Claude as an onboarding buddy to ask about the code base, write automated tests, and suggest manual test cases. That gave confidence to ship again, and managers elsewhere report shipping code again with Claude.
Why do promoted engineers often struggle as managers?
Management uses a different set of skills from engineering: coaching, prioritizing, and resolving conflict instead of building. Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull argued in their 1969 book that people are promoted for success in one role until they reach one they do not do well. Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill followed new managers through their first year for her book Becoming a Manager. She found that many started out believing the job meant exercising authority and had to relearn it as building relationships.
How can an AI help someone learn a code base?
A model with access to a repository can read files, trace how functions call each other, and explain the structure in plain language. A newcomer can ask where a feature lives or why a module exists and get an answer tied to the actual code. It can also draft automated tests, which show how the code is meant to behave. Onboarding that once took weeks of reading can start with a conversation.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
