Presenting Prajakta Yerpude
Prajakta spent a decade climbing every rung of the data engineering ladder, intern, engineer, senior, lead, manager, and somewhere along the way realized her biggest impact was no longer in the code she wrote but in the people she unblocked.
Getting promoted into management felt like winning. I had the title, the 1:1s, the org chart with my name at the top. What nobody told me was that everything I had spent years getting good at had just become irrelevant.
The skills that got me the promotion were the wrong ones for the job. Speed, ownership, technical control, those are IC superpowers. In management, they become liabilities.
Prajakta figured this out the hard way too, after a decade climbing every rung of the data engineering ladder. What she learned on the other side is clearer than anything I’ve read on the topic, and it maps almost exactly to where most senior data engineers quietly stall
The data teams that are ahead right now aren’t just experimenting with AI. They’re shipping agentic analytics systems that reason, recommend, and explain their work. And they’re learning things the rest of the industry hasn’t caught up to yet.
Cube’s Agentic Analytics Summit on April 29 is where some of those teams share what they’ve found. Dan Meshkov from Brex will talk about what a data foundation looks like for a mission-driven company. Gabe Romero from Jobber will cover how financial reporting changes when you move beyond charts. Joe Reis will dig into data engineering in the agentic era.
If you lead a data team or build data infrastructure, the insights here could save you months of trial and error.
You Are Already a Manager Before the Title
Most people wait for the promotion to start operating differently. That is the wrong order.
The data professionals who get promoted into leadership are not the ones who wanted the title. They are the ones who were already doing the work before anyone gave it to them. Clarifying requirements with stakeholders when nobody asked. Helping teammates get unblocked when they had their own deliverables to ship. Asking the why behind the problem instead of just solving the what.
The Week Your Code Sits Untouched
There is a specific moment that signals the shift. You get to the end of a week and realize you made almost no progress on your own work — but the team moved forward because of the conversations you had.
That discomfort is the job changing underneath you.
If you wait until the title to start operating at the next level, you are asking your manager to take a bet on future behavior. That is a harder sell than showing them behavior that is already there.
Speaking Up Is a Skill
Early in any leadership journey, the most uncomfortable moment is the same for almost everyone: being in a room of more experienced people, knowing something is wrong, and deciding whether to say it.
The imposter syndrome is real. The difference is learning not to let it make the decision for you.
Facts Remove the Politics
In data, you have a specific advantage: you can ground a challenge in numbers and evidence. When you do that, you shift the conversation from opinion to information. The most experienced person in the room does not win by default anymore.
Leadership is about stepping up when something needs to be said. That is available to you at any level. An intern can flag a bad assumption. A senior IC can challenge a decision made three levels above them.
The cost of staying quiet is harder to measure than the cost of speaking up. But it compounds over time.
Empathy Is Leverage.
As engineers, we are trained to solve technical problems. The higher you go, the more you realize the hardest problems are people problems.
Misalignment. Stress. Lack of clarity. Someone having an off day. These do not have a clean solution. Some of them do not need a solution at all. Instead, they need listening.
The Problem-Solver Trap
The instinct to fix things immediately is exactly what gets senior ICs into leadership. It is also the thing that makes early management hard.
Not every situation calls for a solution. Sometimes the person in front of you just needs to feel heard. When you learn to read that distinction — when you can tell the difference between a problem that needs solving and a person who needs to know you are paying attention — the team responds differently.
People who feel understood and supported perform better without you pushing harder. You do not manufacture that with a process or a framework. It is built through consistent, genuine attention to what is actually going on beneath the surface.
Technical skills get you to the role. Empathy and emotional intelligence determine how far you go inside it.
Your Impact Becomes Invisible. That Is the Whole Point.
As an IC, your output is visible. Code you wrote. Pipelines you fixed. A cost number you moved. You can point to it directly.
As a manager, your impact shows up through other people. Better decisions. Stronger execution. A team delivering consistently and growing in the process. None of that has your name on it.
Unlearning the Need to Own the Outcome
The hardest thing to unlearn is tying your personal value to what you directly produce.
Andy Grove put it clearly in High Output Management: your output as a manager is your team’s output. That is the measure. You do not have a separate output anymore. The team speaks on your behalf.
That means impact can look like:
Creating the right direction when things are ambiguous
Removing friction before it slows the team down
Helping someone succeed in a way they would not have without your support
Building the environment in which good work happens consistently
You stop building systems. You start building the conditions in which good systems get built. That is more scalable than anything you could ship yourself.
The Myth That Needs to Die
The most persistent management myth: a good manager always has to be in control of everything.
New managers fall into it. Experienced managers fall into it. They believe that effectiveness means knowing every detail, monitoring closely, and constantly stepping in. What that actually creates is dependency. It slows people down. It makes you a single point of failure.
The Real Measure
The actual measure of good leadership is when your team can collaborate, problem-solve, and resolve issues without you needing to be in the room. When something gets fixed before you even know it happened. That is the job done well.
High standards work better when trust already exists. When people know you genuinely support them, they are more open to feedback, more willing to stretch, more willing to take on work that makes them uncomfortable.
You can be kind and still be clear. You can be supportive and still hold people accountable. The balance is a more effective version of both.
Final Thoughts
The move from IC to manager is a step sideways into a completely different job that happens to sit inside the same organization.
The data professionals who stall at senior are almost always technically strong. They can build. What they have not yet built is the capacity to make others better at building.
If you are waiting until you feel ready to step into that, here is the honest version: you will never feel fully ready.
Growth happens because you stepped forward before you did.
—
Yordan
More on the Topic
These are some of the articles Prajakta mentioned in our chat:
