Yersultan Sapar is co-founder and CTO at Perceptis AI, an operating system for SMB consulting to win more business.
As a technical leader, you’ve likely walked the path from individual contributor to executive, discovering that success requires far more than technical expertise. In my journey from engineer to technical executive, I’ve identified four key principles that helped me successfully finish impactful and collaborative projects. Whether you’re managing your first team or leading an entire technical organization, these insights will help you build more impactful and collaborative engineering cultures.
Being Persistent In Working On What You Like
As a technical leader, you know your engineers go through ruthless prioritization to stay focused on pressing business challenges. New features that address these problems often involve multistage planning and require persistent effort across several teams for long periods. Amid technical architecture design and performance optimization tasks, it’s easy to get swayed by the current and find yourself working on something you don’t enjoy.
In every team I’ve been a part of, I always ensured that I engaged with projects that I had some personal connection to. It might be a tech stack I was curious to learn about or a product that was something I needed in my own life. Surprisingly, one can often find a particular spin to almost any project that can make it so much more exciting. Frequent reflections and finding new ways to enjoy the problem helped me stay engaged through the ups and downs of projects and drive them to completion. As a leader of the engineering team, you need to check in with folks often: “What was your most/least favorite part of the last project? Why?” “What would you be excited to try next?”
Asking For Help Early Enough
As an organization becomes more successful and expands, its experience in solving various types of problems grows too. More often than not, a technical problem your team is facing has already been solved in the organization, even if the business need or the implementation details might have been different.
As an individual contributor, it was helpful for me to adopt the mindset of how much impact I can bring to the team rather than how many problems I can solve in isolation. With this lens, I could manage large projects and meet new people outside of my immediate organization, which facilitated future collaboration opportunities. For instance, I would often quickly write a proof of concept for the problem and invest more time in finding the right people in the organization to help me solve current roadblocks and anticipate future technical challenges. I was fortunate that people were open to sharing their knowledge and guiding me in discussions.
As a technical leader, I view the culture of healthy collaboration as a required value in the team. Allowing teams to collaborate freely, share their expertise and be able to learn from each other are some of the principles that you could bring to your team to help them accomplish more.
Having A Holistic Lens On The Product
Encouraging individual contributors to offer perspectives on product design is another tactic that proved invaluable. In all of the projects I led or participated in, I was involved in some capacity with design, marketing, testing, demos, executive presentations and roadmap planning—and the list goes on. Of course, engineering time is precious for the business and should be primarily directed toward building. In fact, building robust systems remained my number one priority all the time. However, I found it enriching for my engineering work to understand all other parts of the business and see how my work fits with or facilitates improvements in them.
Engaging your engineering team early in the design phase can help them build a holistic view of the project and allows them to understand what actually drives the technical requirements, what trade-offs were considered, who the final audience is and so on.
Focus On Iteration Speed
For new ideas and unproven hypotheses, it takes some upfront investment to better assess the potential value. One way you and your team can accelerate learning is to build from the perspective of fast iterations.
For example, in one of my projects, I proposed an internal tool early enough to enable a tight feedback loop between testing and development teams. Designing for iteration speed from the start allowed us to explore many concepts and compare them effortlessly. As a result, when we picked the final architecture, we built up enough confidence that we understood the surface area of potential solutions.
It might help to think through where some investment in iteration speed can greatly accelerate your research and development teams, whether it’s work on internal tools or a shift in the team culture. It might not even require engineering resources—the latest generative AI tools are quite good at creating interfaces and iterating on them based on rough descriptions of the next steps.
Effective software engineering often lies beyond writing code and meeting technical requirements:
1. Connect projects with personal growth. Regular check-ins with your team about their interests and aspirations are essential for maintaining momentum on long-term initiatives.
2. Foster a help-first culture. Create a culture where asking questions is seen as a strength, not a weakness.
3. Engage engineering early in design. I’ve seen firsthand how engineers who understand the broader business context make better technical decisions and often innovate in unexpected ways.
4. Emphasize iteration speed. Your team’s ability to learn and adapt quickly is often more valuable than perfect execution from the first try.
By implementing these principles, you can build a strong and lean team where great engineering thrives.
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