Manager-as-IC Onboarding
New managers ship as individual contributors first — and keep doing it — before and while they manage people.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Fiona Fung has every manager start as an individual contributor and continue coding part-time as a player-coach. Before taking on the heavy responsibility of supporting people, a manager gets maker time to go deep into the code base and product, which builds real rapport with the team and keeps the leader in the flow of a fast-changing product. She herself did this at Meta (first quarter as an IC) and again joining Anthropic.
Origin
Fiona Fung, drawn from her own path — she credits her Microsoft-to-Meta transition where she spent her first quarter as a Meta IC, and repeated the pattern at Anthropic.
Core principles
- 01Delay the heavy responsibility of managing people until you understand the work
- 02Maker time in the code base and product builds rapport managers can't get from managing
- 03Doing PRs matters less for what you fix than for staying in the flow of a fast-changing product
- 04Leaders who don't live and breathe the product lose touch when relying only on dashboards
How to run it
- 1
Start every manager as an IC
When a manager joins, have them ship as an individual contributor first rather than immediately reaching into the manager toolbox.
Pro tip Use AI as an onboarding buddy to learn the code base and design manual test plans that give you confidence to ship.
- 2
Use maker time to learn the codebase and product
Spend the initial period going deep into the code, tools, and product to understand what it's actually like to be an engineer on the team.
Watch out If you skip this and start 'doing manager-y things' immediately, you miss the rapport and product feel that make you effective later.
- 3
Keep shipping part-time as a player-coach
Continue doing PRs and dogfooding even after taking on people responsibility, to stay in the flow of a rapidly changing product.
Pro tip The content of the PRs matters less than the daily touch it keeps you in.
In the wild
Fiona interviewed as a manager at Meta but spent roughly her first quarter as an IC to learn what it's like to ship as a Meta engineer, having previously only known Microsoft's code bases and tools.
→ She built the product and team understanding that made her subsequent management effective, and repeated the pattern joining Anthropic.
Common mistakes
Reaching for the manager toolbox on day one
Jumping straight into managing without doing the work skips the rapport-building and hands-on product understanding that make a manager credible and effective.
Leading only through dashboards
A leader who isn't living and breathing the product loses the touch-and-feel for it, no matter how good the metrics and presentations are.
Is it for you?
Best for
Engineering and product managers joining a new team, especially where the product and tooling change quickly
Not ideal for
Non-technical management contexts or very large orgs where a leader realistically cannot do meaningful IC work
From the transcript
“before you have to take on that full responsibility, give yourself that maker time to actually type deep into the code and learn the code…”
“even me doing PRs it's less about what it is I'm fixing, it's more about me”
“if you actually give yourself time to not have to worry about that first and actually learn what it's like to be an engineer and…”
From the episode
What happens after coding is solved?
Fiona Fung (Manager of the Claude Code and Cowork Teams)