Here's how you can move from individual contributor to team leader as a software engineer.

These are some of the abilities you must master to go beyond senior software engineer level: 🌱 Leadership. 📢 Effective communication. 📆 Consistency. ❓ Deal with complexity and ambiguity. 🏆 Be able to delegate and know how to support your teammates. 👩🏼🔬 Influence others and get buy in for your initiatives. 👨🏼🏫 Expert mentor and mentee. ✖️ Multiply your impact.

If you want to grow, and this is not specific to Software Engineering - you need: 1. 50% Hard skills (your technical know-how). 2. 10% Soft skills (some business acumen) 3. 10% Humility (you're not the best, and you're not the smartest) 4. 30% The right attitude (appetite to learn, be better and help others) If you lack in any of the above, then that will define the type of leader you would be. If you don't have Hard Skills, people will not respect your authority - if you don't have the soft skills you wont be able to apply yourself and provide the right solutions for the right problem, if you don't have humility - well you'll just embarrass yourself and if you don't have the attitude, you wont have any influence to drive change.

Transitioning from an IC is not for everybody - and there is nothing wrong with that. You must put others before yourself at every point and understand that your role now revolves around unblock and helping others. You will not be able to work on code as much, not be creative with your code, its not about story points anymore - this doesn't mean that there isn't a challenge in the leadership role, you have to empower your team, manage them and most importantly mentor them so that they can become the best versions of themselves. If they have a setback, it will be your responsibility as much as theirs, if they succeed, it will be your success as much as theirs. This sort of mindset is very important if you want to make the move.