From Teammate to Manager: A Practical Playbook for Leading Your First Small Team with Confidence

John Vanee is a leadership coach and former engineering leader with more than fifteen years of experience managing small teams across technology and operations. He started his career as a software engineer, and he took his first management role at twenty-six, armed with a promotion and very little else — no training, no manual, and no honest account of what the job actually required. That experience, and the years of trial and error that followed, became the foundation of this book.

Since then, John has led teams of three to thirty people at companies ranging from startups to enterprise organizations, built an internal manager-training curriculum used by hundreds of first-time leaders, and coached more than two hundred new managers one-on-one. He is a frequent speaker on first-time management, feedback, and team culture, and his writing on leadership has appeared in business and industry publications.

John lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two children. He still volunteers as a mentor for first-time engineering managers, and he believes the most important question any new manager can ask is not "What should I do?" but "What do my people need?" *From Teammate to Manager* is his first book.