Over the last holiday break, I covered for my boss, the VP of Engineering. During that time I covered his full scope, around 40+ engineers, six different squads building everything from a DAO to Core Infra to hardware integrations. As I sat down to write out all the things that I had done, I realized that I had forgotten the thing my squads delivered, our consumer USD Vault Platform.

If you’ve stepped into more scope and can’t remember what you did, this post is for you. You can look back at your calendar, see all those meetings and think to yourself “I didn’t do anything”. And that’s the problem. It has taken me many years to understand that those meetings, that is the work.

During the paternity leave I covered multiple squads where I didn’t know the language (Go, Rust, Java). I couldn’t actively contribute to the codebase, nor should I. My value was coordinating what was happening. My job was to keep information flowing between the squads, between senior leadership, and with external partners. Basically, keep the ship sailing.

The transition from IC is challenging. Before, you wanted deep concentration time. But now, you need the communication, the touch points, to make the connections between what people are saying. Identifying what information needs to be passed along, that otherwise would be lost. In the beginning, the shape of the work changes without you realizing. Part of you knows that now you have to adapt and adjust, but I haven’t seen a leader go from IC to Leadership mentally. To slowly step back from the code and operate at a higher level.

In the same six weeks I responded to a security incident on the DAO product. I wrote the fix myself, opened the PR, deployed it. I remember every part of it. The launch and the hotfix were the same six weeks. The difference between what I remember and what I forgot wasn’t how important the fix was. It was whose name was on the work.

When my boss returned, he saw the work I’d half-forgotten. The launch shipped because the squads did the work. It escaped me because none of it had my name on it. As the leader in charge, it was still my project.

If this is you, document everything. Then trust what the people around you are already seeing, even when you can’t see it yourself.