I have roughly 8 years experience working as a software developer on many technologies. I know my stuff, but I really want to become a technical manager so I can have more control and responsibility on a project.
I also know a fair bit about architecture, estimation, how to manage people, interact with clients, write specifications and delivering on time, but I don't have a PMP certificate or anything like that.
How can I land a position as a technical manger at another company?
The key here is to simply get started on something (anything really) that gets you any kind of management experience you can use to get a different job at another company or get promoted in your current company.
Landing a manager job at another company might be tricky with no management experience. I'd try to gain some experience at my current job before moving on.
You can also check on your company's tuition reimbursement plan and see if they'll pay for you to get a MBA.
If you want to stay at your current company.
you have to start small, gain confidence of your managers and gradually increase your responsibilities.
See if you can be a task lead on a small (quick turnaround) project.
I'm not clear from your post if you are looking to gain a position where you have more authority/responsibility/accountability for the software product. Or if you are looking to land a management position in order to boss people around.
If it is the prior, then look for a company practicing agile development. You will get plenty of face time with customers and plenty of say in the design and architecture of the product; even more so if the company is small.
If it is the later, then work on your interviewing skills. Take some classes in sales. Talk a good talk. Then look into banking/finance companies. They love command and control:)
A technical manager/team lead is not a project manager so a PMP shouldn't be necessary. In fact, technical people tend to make terrible project managers because they always manage around the idea of the triple constraints (time, scope, cost). A real project manager is focused on many other dimensions such as stakeholder management, communication, resources, etc. that need to be constantly monitored and controlled.
To be a good technical manager/team lead requires that you:
You need to establish a track record that demonstrates experience managing teams and delivery on a number of different sized projects. If you don't have a track record for this, you need to create opportunities within your existing organization for that. Not many companies are going to take the risk of putting you in a position of responsibility if you cannot demonstrate a clear track record for delivering success to the business in the past. The first question you will often get in interviews is: "What size teams have you led?"
The best thing you can do is get your resume together and find a technical recruiting firm and let them know that you are ready to start managing. I would also suggest taking some social interaction/management classes...many companies offer these types of classes. I think these are a must because they teach you:
The “how to land a position as a technical manager at another company” question doesn’t seem to provide any obvious, nor practical answer, at least to me. Thinking of technical managers who I personally know I realise that there are about a gazillion ways of becoming one, some of which seem to do more with luck rather than a fail-safe method. One thing for sure developers don’t seem to morph into managers automatically as they grow older. Notoriously there is also chicken and egg problem with the management experience needed to get the job.
Instead let’s approach the problem from the other end by asking “why do companies hire technical managers externally”? Is there anything in you currently that you could use to substitute for much needed chicken or egg (depending on the side you take in the debate)? Here the answers are a tad more obvious:
Hence from the point of view of whoever makes the hiring decision you need to appear as capable, willing, loyal and trustworthy to land the job.
Loyalty and trust are the easy ones. New hires as a rule are loyal to whoever has hired them. Who you know or who you have worked with in the past can help here a lot as well.
The qualities of willingness and ability to do the job however are not quite clear and best answered with yet another question: what do technical managers do?
Managerial job boils down to the same things developers do: creation, maintenance, support, fixing, monitoring and troubleshooting of complex systems. Just when programmers deal with the systems primarily made of software, hardware and data, managers work in the domain of systems concerned with people, money and ways of doing things.
The practical implications of this difference as far as willingness concerned is that manager needs to be comfortable dealing with people, large sums of money and processes. Companies are not interested in managers who’re simply willing to do the job because it pays well, but rather these who know and understand difficulties of the job and then still genuinely want to be doing it.
What abilities are necessary, apart from the basic politeness and charisma which are fundamental to dealing with people? It’s evident that in case company doesn’t have any more internal people capable to do the job it’s because they either exhausted their pool of potential managers, or they want things to be run significantly differently from the way they are now. If the former is the reason all you’ll need is to be skilled as a manager, i.e. know how to handle different aspects of managerial job. One straightforward way to obtain the initial skill is to get some training.
However when a company is looking for someone to come and change the way things are done that’s where it gets interesting. The development might be done using COBOL and Waterfall but they would really want someone to help make a transition into C# and Scrum, or just migrate onto a new version of COBOL. Or their support cannot cope with the flow of bugs and requests and they need someone to organise the operation and up the quality without increasing the head count and spending too much extra money. Or the company plans to go into the mobile software market or car insurance industry and not sure how. In other words something that you consider to be common knowledge might be exactly what they are looking for as long as you’re able to establish and run a new system of doing thing for them.
Granted this kind of experience might be not valuable enough to land a technical manager job with a well-known name or company large enough to offer a compensation package that will put Steve Ballmer to shame. But sure somewhere on the market there is a company that will be happy to accept hard work in exchange for the ability to get the initial experience.
Most companies I've worked had, for better or worse, a policy where you don't really get promoted until you're basically already doing the job. This means hiring someone from outside the company into a management position is rare.
If you want a technical leadership position, you need to be leading already.
Take the initiative to influence from within. It's of course delicate without some official sanction, but spearheading initiatives like getting internal documentation written, improving QA processes, building tools in your spare time. These things get the attention of not only your peers (you're helping make the work environment better) but from management who sees you as a budding leader.