Managing a team of individual contributors (ICs) is already a demanding role, but once your team grows beyond 12 direct reports, everything changes. The complexity increases, the range of challenges expands, and the strategies that worked for a smaller team may no longer be effective.

When my team doubled in size, I had to rethink my entire approach. I faced difficult trade-offs, adjusted my leadership style, and learned what truly matters when managing a large IC team. Here are the key lessons I took away from that experience.

Defining What Matters to You

When leading a large team, the first question to ask yourself is: What is important to me? Without a clear foundation, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of issues and demands for your time.

For me, it meant prioritizing my personal values (family and growth) while also ensuring that my team felt safe, trusted me, maintained autonomy, was empowered, and collaborated effectively.

I found that setting up weekly personal check-ins helped me stay aligned. If I felt something was misaligned—whether my workload, my growth, or the team’s health—I would act on it, even if it meant making hard changes.

Takeaway:

• Define what truly matters to you in work and life.
• Identify behaviors that help you check if you’re staying aligned with those values.
• Set clear expectations with yourself: What will you do when things don’t go as planned?

More People, More Problems

A rough estimate: each person on a team will go through a crisis for about three months of the year (not consecutively, but in total). With a team of 12+ ICs, that means at any given time, multiple people will need significant support.

Beyond individual challenges, performance is always relative. The more people you manage, the more variance in performance you will see—some will be thriving, while others will be struggling. The probability that at least one person is underperforming increases, and when a team member leaves or a conflict arises, the number of people affected is higher.

At some point, I had to acknowledge: I am not a therapist, and I cannot prevent every failure. My role is to provide guidance, not to solve every problem.

Takeaway:

• Expect that challenges will always exist—don’t chase a problem-free state.
• Choose which problems you will not solve.
• Avoid helicopter management—prioritize issues the same way you would tasks.

Where to Focus: What’s Going Right or Wrong?

As a manager, you always have a choice: do you invest your time in what’s going well, what’s going wrong, or both?

With a larger team, I had to be intentional. I chose to focus on what was going wrong while delegating investments in what was going right. This was difficult because I naturally enjoy fostering success, but struggling areas required much more attention.

Takeaway:

• Make your priorities clear to the team.
• Use the Five Whys to determine where your focus should go.
• Keep a work log to track and reassess where you spend your time.

Prioritization and Delegation: The LNO Framework

I used to operate on a last-in, first-out approach, driven by my desire to always follow through on commitments. This led me to prioritize tasks based on promise rather than impact.

I tried several frameworks in the past, but they always felt artificial. This time, I adopted the LNO framework by Shreyas Doshi:

• Leverage: Tasks I must focus on with high effort and intensity to create a meaningful impact.
• Neutral: Routine tasks that require time but not deep focus.
• Overhead: Must-do tasks that don’t require high effort—complete them quickly with minimal investment.

This shift was drastic. It also forced me to let go of using tasks as a way to measure my contribution. Now, I optimize for Leverage tasks and delegate the rest.

Takeaway:

• Reassess how you prioritize your work.
• Practice radical delegation.

The TPM Pitfall

With a larger team comes more projects. More projects require more coordination. As an engineering manager, I found myself drifting into the role of a TPM (Technical Program Manager).

I had to consciously step back and avoid becoming the team’s de-facto project manager. Instead, I built a system to distribute the work:

• Defined DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals) and their responsibilities.
• Clear rules of engagement for ownership and execution.
• Documented and standardized project management practices.
• A capacity planning model to help balance the workload.

Performance Management: The Hardest Trade-off

With a smaller team, I could dedicate time to supporting underperforming individuals. With 12+ ICs, the equation changes. Investing in one struggling team member means taking time away from others who could create more leverage.

I haven’t found a perfect solution. The best I can do is remind myself: This is my job, I have to do it. But the emotional burden is real.

Managing Time

In a given week, I have 15–19 one-on-one meetings (30 minutes each), plus all the other team and leadership meetings. I mapped out my entire schedule and distributed meetings evenly across the week.

Most importantly, I keep 80% of my Fridays free for deep work, reflection, and catching up.

I also made two big changes:

• Skipping meetings where I wasn’t essential.
• Doubling down on asynchronous work. Managing a bigger team made me realize just how bad we were at async collaboration.

Takeaway:

• Protect deep work time—don’t let meetings consume your schedule.
• Make async work a priority, not an afterthought.

Measuring Personal, Team, and Business Pulse

At the core of everything we do is people. Understanding how they’re doing is critical.

I built a personal dashboard, Vardan’s Pulse, where I manually log my well-being, productivity, and other key factors. Over time, I extended this approach to the team with a quarterly pulse survey and a team dashboard.