We had suffered a massive outage. It was so big that it made headlines across our industry, caused tangible customer churn, and sent ripples of distrust through the businesses we served. While nobody would wish for this to happen, it is something that will happen to practically any technology business eventually, and what is important is how you respond.

I thought that my company responded perfectly. They openly apologized, took responsibility, and enacted changes through the product engineering organization to shore up the stability and reliability of our systems. It was the right thing to do.

It was as if a light bulb had turned on over my head, like in cartoons.

I was discussing some performance issues in our application with the team, and I had laid out what I thought were the things we could do on our own and what we would probably need to lean on our platform support team to help out with.

I then roughly described how I thought things could play out depending on whether the platform team prioritized our concerns or not, and how that might impact what we did next.

When I work with engineers who have decided to begin managing people, there are a few opportunity areas I look out for that I see time and again. New managers make mistakes, just like anyone does when they are learning a new skill, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is one mistake that is by far the most common and it can be one of the hardest to learn when you’re new to it.