Moving from a maker to a manager
Paul Graham published this article about maker and manager timescales which defined the main differences in perception and schedule between those that make and those that manage and the problems that can cause.
At about the same time that article was published I started a transition from a maker to a manager that is still ongoing and surprisingly hard to navigate. The usual expected problems of being promoted from within a team were minimized by virtue of the fact I was primarily the designer and front end guy working with a team of pure developers and so was always slightly apart from the crowd anyway. That and the startup I work for is small and has a pretty flat hierarchy.
Surprisingly my main problem has been the redefinition what I expect of myself. My expectation used to be that at the end of the day there would be a small pile of code or images that are production ready and in the git repo. And suddenly my output is my thoughts, opinion or influence sometimes in wireframe form and sometimes verbal so how can I as an employee measure my own performance when I have nothing to show for it? We are a tiny company so of course I still cut code and I still photoshop production images from time to time but that only appears to confuse my poor addled maker brain and skew the teams agile velocity.
Part of navigating this transition will affect this journal as well. Not sure how as yet, it may increase the frequency of code and imagery as I’m no longer getting my ‘maker’ fix at work but the more text based output may well increase as I practice the art of expressing an opinion with words rather than through a medium such as music or design.