I got my start in engineering management by supervising interns and then moved on to leading a team of 7. It was a great way to learn how to help other people do the work instead of just doing it, and I recommend it if it’s available.

There’s a lot of day-to-day stuff that I had read about but only really understood when I did it: how to agree as a team on a technical roadmap, how to give feedback, and how to hire. Probably the most difficult thing which took years was learning how to control my emotions; when you’re a manager and things are breaking, you can’t just jump in and debug, you’ve gotta figure out how to help the team perform at their best. Sometimes this is getting people the right tools, other times it’s giving them time to work things out, in extreme cases it’s changing the team members. I found making these decisions stressful until I had a lot of practice.