GeeCON 2024: Katarzyna Osuch-Bukowska - Climbing Towards a Managerial Career in Engineering

### Overview In this talk presented at GeeCON 2024, Katarzyna Osuch-Bukowska addresses software engineers transitioning from individual contributor roles to engineering leadership. Drawing on a decade of developer experience, ten years leading software teams across industries (finance, sports betting, hospitality, and transportation), and her perspective as Director of Engineering at FedEx Dataworks Poland, she demystifies the behavioral interview stage essential for landing roles such as team leader, engineering manager, or engineering director.

### Key Topics - **Interview Formats in Engineering Leadership:** The speaker outlines three common formats: behavioral interviews (the baseline standard evaluating past behavior to predict future performance), stress interviews (deliberately uncomfortable interviews designed to test stress handling, which the speaker cautions can create unhealthy relationships), and presentations (typical for senior positions, involving preparing and presenting a strategy or past project). - **Understanding the Behavioral Interview:** Behavioral interview questions (e.g., handling conflicts, facing failures, managing project deadlines, making tough tech decisions) assess underlying leadership competencies. Interviewers use past actions to gauge future impact, operating under the premise that past behavior predicts future performance. - **Preparation Strategy:** Candidates should reflect on their career history to identify one to two concrete, up-to-date stories across key areas: major successes, failures/mistakes, supporting others' growth, conflict resolution, tough decisions, and tight deadlines. Stories should emphasize personal actions, assertiveness, and quantify impact (e.g., team size, budgets, users). Candidates without formal management experience can highlight informal leadership (mentorship, technical direction, interviewing) or relevant non-work leadership experiences (such as acting as a diving instructor). - **The STAR Technique:** Osuch-Bukowska recommends the STAR framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to keep narratives structured, concise (target under one minute), and free of rambling or watery speech. The 'Action' step must be the core focus, detailing specific personal decisions, while 'Result' highlights concrete outcomes. - **Mindset and Self-Promotion:** Transitioning engineers must overcome discomfort with self-promotion. Osuch-Bukowska emphasizes that leaders must be capable of advocating for their teams, projects, and ideas, recommending the book *Power Your Career: The Art of Tactful Self-Promotion at Work*.

### Technical Details The speaker walks through three concrete structural examples applying the STAR methodology: 1. **Supporting Growth:** Addressing the question *"How do you help others grow?"*, the candidate establishes mentoring a senior engineer (Situation), sets a six-month goal for promotion (Task), details actions including drafting mentoring agreements, preparing for performance reviews, teaching 1-on-1 and stakeholder management skills, and recommending books and training (Action), ending with the mentee's successful promotion to lead a team of five (Result). 2. **Meeting Tight Deadlines:** For handling delayed deliveries, a manager describes stepping into a stalled cloud transaction processing system project (Situation), defining the target to deliver the second deadline in six months (Task), assessing capacity, discovering requirements were double team bandwidth, documenting findings, and negotiating scope reduction with the product director (Action), resulting in on-time delivery for pilot clients and scaling to roughly 100 companies (Result). 3. **Handling Failures:** For mistakes or SLA breaches, a manager recounts exceeding disaster recovery SLA timeouts (Situation), owning the incident root-cause analysis (Task), holding retrospectives, pulling in a principal SRE, updating logging standards, and enforcing compliance across teams (Action), which eliminated future recovery delays (Result).

### Takeaways - Focus responses on personal agency—highlight actions using direct phrasing (*"I organized," "I convinced," "I realized"*) rather than generic team descriptions. - Keep stories concise, precise, and under one minute; allow the interviewer to ask follow-up questions if they need additional depth. - Never conceal past mistakes; demonstrate accountability, root-cause analysis, and lessons learned. - Maintain authenticity and honesty. If an interviewer asks about a scenario you haven't faced, admit it openly and outline a hypothetical approach rather than fabricating an experience. - Prepare insightful questions for the interviewer at the close of the session, such as asking about their biggest business challenges and how the role directly helps address them.