Hi, I'm Andrea.

I wanted to become a manager. I just had no idea how hard the transition would actually be — or how unprepared I was for what it actually required.

My path in was abrupt: a merger took out my manager and most of the team, and overnight I was responsible for rebuilding it. No training, no playbook, no one to ask. I remember sitting across from my first candidate — more nervous as the interviewer than I had ever been as the interviewee — with no real framework for how to assess whether someone would be the right fit. I was figuring it out in real time and hoping no one noticed.

When my first analyst joined, a different kind of hard began. I kept asking myself: if I'm not the one producing the work, what exactly is my value? So I stayed too involved — fixing things myself, telling myself I was being helpful. What I was actually doing was making sure she never had to figure things out on her own. I was her bottleneck, not her manager.

I also made the quieter mistake of prioritizing being liked over being useful. I avoided hard conversations. I put team development in the backseat. That worked fine — until one analyst started severely underperforming, and I had to reckon with what my conflict-avoidance had cost her. Learning to manage that situation forced me to stop being afraid of honest feedback. It changed how I managed everything else.

Seven years in, I lead differently. Not perfectly — but with intention, with a real system, and with far less of the noise that made those early years so hard. Code to People is the resource I wish I'd had. The frameworks, the honest talk about the identity shift, and the practical systems that make this transition actually work — built for people who think the way I do.