Tip
Christian Idiodi talks about promotions: “Most people are promoted to a point of incompetency… Lenny is a fantastic engineer, he wins engineer of the year awards, everybody knows him. The next role from senior engineer is engineering manager. We love Lenny, we don’t want to lose him, so we promote him. But Lenny has never been a manager in his whole life. He’s never interviewed people, fired people, coached people. After a couple months, nobody’s clapping for him at company meetings anymore… He doesn’t recognize that his job has changed. His job is no longer to solve the problem directly, but to get a team of other people good at solving problems… The best place to learn how to be a VP is when you’re not a VP because that’s where you practice being a VP.”
Turns out AI team promotions work the same way.
Your AI team lead wants to promote Sarah to AI Engineering Manager. She’s brilliant—ships models faster than anyone, solves the hardest optimization problems, presents at conferences, everyone respects her technically. The team needs a manager, and Sarah’s the obvious choice. Your lead says, “She’s ready. Best engineer we have.”
Younger leaders look at current performance: Sarah’s the best engineer, so she’ll be the best manager. Linear thinking. You’ve seen this movie before. In 2012, you promoted your best salesperson to sales manager—within 6 months the team was a mess because he kept closing deals himself instead of coaching. In 2017, you promoted your best designer to head of design—she couldn’t let go and micromanaged every pixel. Both failed not because they lacked talent, but because they never practiced the new job.
You know the pattern: being great at the IC role predicts almost nothing about management success. So before you approve Sarah’s promotion, you ask the hard questions: “Has she ever coached a junior engineer through a project? Has she run team planning meetings? Has she given critical performance feedback? Has she resolved conflicts between teammates? Has she hired anyone?” The answers are all no. She’s never done any management work.
So instead of promoting her immediately and watching her fail publicly, you create practice arenas: have her mentor a junior engineer for 3 months, run team planning for one sprint cycle, shadow you giving performance reviews, lead one hiring process. After 6 months of doing manager work without the title, you promote her—and she succeeds because she’s already practiced the job. The title just makes it official.
This judgment—knowing that great IC performance doesn’t predict management success, and insisting on practice before promotion—comes from watching enough brilliant ICs fail as managers. The pattern is always the same: they jump in to solve problems themselves instead of coaching others, they can’t let go of the work they loved, they get frustrated when the team moves slower than they could alone. Younger leaders promote based on past performance. You promote based on demonstrated capability in the new role. That wisdom comes from seeing both approaches fail and succeed repeatedly.
Context
Christian Idiodi is a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG), coach at top tech companies, and founder of the Innovate Africa Foundation. He specializes in product coaching and leadership development.
His core insight: companies promote people to learn the job instead of promoting people who’ve already practiced the job, leading to widespread management failure. For experienced executives making AI team promotion decisions, this pattern recognition is critical—you’ve watched enough brilliant ICs fail as managers to know that current performance doesn’t predict future success.
That comes from seeing the promotion-into-incompetence pattern play out dozens of times.