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Four years after founding the company, I’m stepping away from executive management at LocalStack. It was not an easy decision, but came after months of reflecting, and the honest realization that I was drifting away from the kind of impact that gives me energy. I’m now moving back into a cross-team IC-focused role, and it’s a good opportunity to tell this story, in the hopes it might help others in similar situations find the courage to make a change!

The road to now

Bootstrapping LocalStack

It’s April 2021, and we’re a couple of months away from incorporating. I reach out to some of the best people I’ve worked with in the past, and convince them to quit their well-paying and secure job and instead join a scrappy little startup with a small seed funding of $3M. To my initial surprise, almost everyone I reach out to is all-in. The energy this gives me is hard to explain, but it resolves all the doubts I had about letting my other ventures go to focus entirely on LocalStack.

LocalStack Founders at re:Invent in 2022 (fltr: Thomas, Gerta, Waldemar)

Together with this small rag-tag group of engineers and my two co-founders, I roll up my sleeves, and set out to do the prep work for our long growth journey ahead, transforming the LocalStack OSS project, Waldemar’s incredible creation he had already worked on for several years, into a world-class product platform.

Almost all of those folks are still in the company by the way. Having grown to senior, staff, team lead, and engineering manager roles, they continue to be the bedrock of our engineering team, and I’m incredibly grateful to them.

The joy and cost of generalist leadership

Being a Lead Developer

I spend a lot of my time in the code base, finding bottlenecks for our growing team. While building new product features myself, I also start solving some higher-order problems. Like building a framework for generalizing the development of AWS service emulators, which has since transformed how we work at LocalStack. I also spearhead initiatives like dogfooding LocalStack, where we deploy and test our AWS-backed platform on LocalStack. This also marks the beginning of the LocalStack extension system, which allows us to emulate our payment backend Stripe directly in LocalStack. It is innovative and deeply technical work, and with our small team of highly skilled and driven engineers, the progress we make feels spectacular.

Being a Company Architect

With my co-founders focusing heavily on the business, in particular customer and investor relations, my natural focus is facing inwards, essentially greenfielding the company with this young and highly driven team. I can focus working on the things that drew me to found a company in the first place: to create an interesting place to work, where people show up because they can work on things they care about, with people they enjoy working with. So naturally I spend a lot of time thinking about culture and designing ways of remote work collaboration.

We lack executive-level or director-level people with deep industry experience, and being first time founders, most of what we do and how we do things comes from first principles and our intuitions. So I immerse myself in literature and learn how other companies do things. I learn about 3M’s 15% time, Valve’s flat org structure, Basecamp’s Shape Up, DoorDash’s “We Dash”, self-organizing projects like Kubernetes, and many other ideas, which inspire processes we design with the team: our Incubator program to foster bottom-up innovation, regular hackathons to try out crazy new things on company time, Mentors instead of Managers, Special Interest Groups, and a “We Support” support rotation where everyone (co-founders included) is put into the shoes of the customer, all of which shape the culture at LocalStack, and creates a place where people love to come to work.

All these ideas, cherry-picked and adapted from other successful and unique ventures, end up forming “The LocalStack Way”. Here’s a collage from that presentation that I should probably write a separate post about:

Everything everywhere all at once

As founders we tend to be everywhere at once, shaping systems and teams across the company. In this undefined role, I execute quickly with the team, lay out the technical vision for the core product, make process and hiring decisions across functions, and start building out other teams.

While my co-founders are building out other areas of the organization like HR, sales, and finance, I step in where there are gaps. We hadn’t set up a clear reporting structure at that point, but effectively I’m managing Engineering, DevRel and Support, scaling the teams, and experiment and build together with them. We don’t have a product team yet, so a lot of product work is driven by myself and the CTO.

Cycling between Engineering, Support, DevRel, Product, Leadership and general Founder activity takes a lot of mental energy. But being so plugged into everything makes designing transversal systems and being the glue between teams much easier. I constantly have the full context allowing me to give clear and coherent directions. Overall things are moving fast, they’re challenging in a good way, and people are genuinely excited to be here. It’s very gratifying.

Becoming specialized

With all our growing teams, it’s becoming more evident that we soon need people who have actual experience in scaling these org functions. We’re around 35 people at this point, and we start hiring a Head of Sales and a Director of Engineering.

LocalStack Team in January 2024

As the teams grow and the foundations are set, I find myself drifting away from the undefined “company architect” role I loved and thrived in. My scope progressively narrows to a Head of Engineering role, responsible primarily for scaling delivery, managing people, and keeping the machine running. I’m no longer interviewing every person who joins the company, but focus now primarily on engineering. More and more of my work happens through others, managing managers and team leads.

I’m also spending more time on foundational things in the engineering department, like designing a career and performance evaluation framework, or setting up OKRs for the next quarter. I like working on those things, but I notice that the work no longer translates naturally to other parts of the organization as it has previously when my role was less specialized.

Breaking points

Drifting from my passion

In 2024, I spend most of my August, September, and October either in 1:1s, candidate interviews, or planning and decision making meetings. I actually hit a low point in technical contributions, which I know I shouldn’t be doing in my role in the first place. Clearly this is not a problem with the role per-se, but with me being terrible at saying no to things. I care too much about everything, and my founder instincts keep pulling me into being everywhere at once, although it’s now completely incompatible with the reality of our, at this point, 70 person company.

With my calendar now being basically fully booked two weeks in advance, it’s becoming harder and harder to carve out what I now know as “maker time”. Whenever I do, I feel guilty for neglecting things I should be focusing on more. And whenever I lean fully into management, despite doing it well, I feel restless and somewhat disconnected from the work that had brought me here in the first place. Charity Majors calls this the engineer/manager pendulum, and some thrive in the swing between modes.

Having spoken to other founders and technical leaders, it’s what many of them end up learning: being good at management doesn’t mean it’s where you’ll do your best or happiest work. I realize that in becoming more specialized, I was also becoming less impactful in the way that matters to me the most.

Losing sight

Together with our expanded leadership team, we organize a management offsite. Two full days spent discussing our many challenges and growth pains, mapping out the next year, and preparing for the changes that Series-A growth will demand.

In earlier phases, moments like this absolutely filled me with energy. I could see with clarity what was needed, and I could see myself stepping into a role that was required of me with purpose and deliberation. But this time is different. Something had shifted: I realize I no longer see myself in the role that this next chapter requires, which had become one of managing and operating at a distance from the work I loved: shaping systems, teams, and products hands-on, all while providing vision and guidance to the teams. But with the way the leadership team is developing, and my two co-founders holding three executive roles: CEO, CTO, and COO, I realize that I’m stuck and my energy and values are pulling me in a different direction.

Being in the trenches again

It’s late October, and I’m called into our Vienna office to deal with yet another office malfunction: water dripping through the ceiling. Again. But it allows me to spend time with everyone like in the early days. I make a round through the office, ask everyone how they’re doing. Some conversations take a minute, others turn into spontaneous paring sessions. I work through an issue with them, and they end up with more clarity and determination than before. I leave the room full of quiet satisfaction, not because of status or authority, but because I was in it again. Present, useful, and technical. Something I realize I’ve been missing deeply over the past months. I didn’t even notice the water dripping onto my laptop.

The next day, I start writing down why I’m going to step away from executive management, and start preparing for the meeting with my co-founders to let them know.

Re-defining impact for myself

Disconnect to reconnect

After months of planning and handing over all of my responsibilities, I took a two-month leave. It felt strange at first, and of course I still opened my laptop regularly, given my irrational fear of the thousands of Slack notifications that I would miss out on if I didn’t. This was before I learned about Shift-Esc and had developed the emotional capacity to actually use it. And because I lack any and all self-control, the only way I could finally disconnect was by logging out of Slack on all my devices.

It was the first time in years I wasn’t surrounded by constant input, decision-making pressure, and fire alarms. I distracted myself with other technical projects, and in the absence of daily notifications, a quietness started taking over that allowed me to detach and reflect more deeply and honestly about the decision I had made.

It’s not actually stepping down

Stepping away from a position of status and authority is incredibly difficult. We’ve been conditioned to equate executive titles with success, so it’s no surprise when doubt starts to creep in that undermines your confidence. Did I fail at my job? Am I giving up and letting people down? Am I damaging my career?

But there’s a growing counter-narrative in the tech world. There is the well-known example of Mitchell Hashimoto’s decision to step down as CTO of HashiCorp to become a Senior IC. There are others too. Former Artsy CTO Daniel Doubrovkine, now Principal Engineer at AWS, Kristina Lustig, former Director of Design at StackOverflow, or Pradipta Banerjee, former CTO now Principal Engineer at Red Hat. They all shared their journey from management back to hands-on engineering. These stories seem like outliers, drowned out by the noise of LinkedIn posts celebrating promotions, but they all share an underlying theme. Each of them had reached a point where traditional definitions of success no longer aligned with their sense of fulfillment. They had confronted what psychologists call the arrival fallacy: the belief that attaining a particular goal will lead to long-term happiness.

Having now recognized this as a trap, I was able to re-frame my own decision. Instead of asking “What am I stepping away from”, I asked myself “what gives me energy, and what takes it away?”, which was much more productive. Was I really at my most impactful in back-to-back meetings, managing OKRs and team performance? Or was I just keeping the machine running, at the cost of the creative work that played to my strengths and brought me here in the first place?

Having authority vs being an authority

I’ve had frustrating experiences in my early career where I couldn’t convince people in power to address problems that seemed so glaringly evident to me, while at the same time lacking the agency to solve them in my own way. I learned that this is common among people stuck in middle management. Whenever I finally did get a position of authority, I was able to drive change quickly and get great results that way. This entrenched my belief that holding a position of authority was the key to having high impact. It’s clear to me now that this was another reason I wanted to found a company in the first place.

Over time, though, I realized that having authority and being an authority aren’t the same thing. Titles can create compliance, but not necessarily conviction. Yes, when people are contractually obliged to follow your lead, change happens fast, but I’ve found that sustained influence doesn’t come from org charts. It comes from vision, trust, and building systems people actually want to work in. Of course these aren’t mutually exclusive, but most of us aren’t really chasing authority, we’re chasing impact.

It comes down to a few simple habits. Be around when it matters, listen to people’s concerns and be their advocate, support and elevate people around you by providing input that leads to better outcomes for them, and inspire by leading by example. To me, this means being hands-on and regularly working shoulder to shoulder. Or, as one of my colleagues succinctly put it, “just sharing your wisdom and then fucking off”. Doing those things will make you an agent of change, regardless of title.

Making room for others

Founders often struggle to let go because they conflate personal value with holding on to certain responsibilities. But roles evolve, and the person who’s best for the job at one stage of a company’s growth may not be the best fit for the next. All this wasn’t just about me.

We had built a strong foundation of systems, culture, and technical vision that no longer depended on me to function. At our size and pace, we needed more leaders whose strengths lay in scaling delivery, applying repeatable management playbooks, navigating teams through organizational change, and creating endless KPI reports while keeping their sanity intact. These are things I was very capable at, but not things I thrived in, and clinging to the seat would have only limited the team. Stepping away created space for new people and new perspectives, while allowing me to focus on cross-team technical leadership, where I knew I could bring the most value to the team and the company.

I’ve always believed in embracing change, whether in our product, processes, or leadership. And I’ve always sought out opportunities to experiment, to learn from others, and be inspired by the experience they bring. Our engineering leadership team is now more distributed, with multiple Directors and Engineering Managers, and they strengthen the company in ways I couldn’t have achieved alone.

Learnings

If you’re considering a change like the one I made, there are a number of learnings that I can offer as advice.

Be honest with yourself: Why do you want a particular role in the first place? Is it impact? Perhaps the work you’ll get to do? Is it about advancing your career? Or is it the allure of Power? Money? Status? I’ve stopped judging people for wanting these things, but be honest with yourself about your motivations, and ask yourself whether they are leading you to meaningful impact and lasting happiness.

You are more than your job: It should be obvious: but you should not attach your self-worth to a role or a job title. It’s very hard to relinquish a title and not feel inadequate in a culture that glorifies titles and promotions. You can read more about how this culture has affected an entire generation in Tim Urban’s blog post on “Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy”. Real self-worth isn’t found on a career ladder; it’s in the value you create, the people you elevate, and the integrity of your actions.

Build a support network: A curse of executive leadership is that it can become lonely, as you have few peers at the company you can open up to and who understand what you’re going through. Build a professional support network outside the company. Find peers who you feel safe to be vulnerable around, and to talk honestly and openly about what you’re going through. You’ll be surprised how many people are going through similar things, and how they open up when you show a bit of vulnerability yourself.

Acknowledge the challenges but focus on the opportunities: Suddenly not being part of the “inner circle” is difficult. There’s a sense that you’re losing control and are no longer informed, but at the same time, most of the things that demanded your attention were probably the things that drove you to change your situation in the first place. As Daniel Doubrovkine put it: “I [knew] all the secrets […] and knew when someone important was quitting or being fired. This is all gone, but so are the agonizing headaches, such as not being able to tell someone that they are about to get laid off”. So you’re not missing out, you’re reclaiming your time for things that matter to you the most.

Re-design your work day: use the opportunity to redesign how you work. For example, you probably don’t have any direct reports anymore, so you have no obligations to have regular 1:1s, but that doesn’t keep you from having them, and they can be extremely useful to keep your finger on the pulse! Make them time bound, and purpose driven. They repeat for eight weeks and then end. Maybe it’s to pair weekly on architecture during big initiatives, or to coach someone hands-on through a difficult period?

You only live once: Hone in on things that matter the most, but don’t compromise on the things you love doing. Everything ends someday. The jobs, the titles, and once the last black hole has evaporated and the universe has succumbed to heat death, even your company. What remains is the journey you lived, the legacy you left, and the impact you had on the people around you.