The Controversial Skills Gap: Why JavaScript Developers Need More Than Just Technical Skills to Move Up

Outcome-first introduction

You can be the developer people rely on to ship the hardest features and the leader who helps an entire product team win. This article shows you how to make that jump. Read it to discover the overlooked skills that separate effective managers from great individual contributors - and the practical steps you can take to start demonstrating them today.

The myth: technical excellence alone will get you promoted

It’s a comfortable story. Be the best coder, get the most complex problems, keep your GitHub profile pristine - and the ladder will open. It’s also incomplete. Technical skills are necessary. They are rarely sufficient.

Companies promote based on impact. But impact is not just lines of code or clever algorithms. Impact is influence, alignment, and measurable outcomes that affect customers and business metrics. Those are achieved through soft skills and business fluency.

What people mean by “skills gap” - and why it’s controversial

When managers say there’s a skills gap, they often mean new managers lack one of three domains:

Communication and people skills (mentoring, feedback, conflict resolution).
Business and product acumen (prioritization, ROI, metrics-driven decisions).
Stakeholder and cross-functional management (influence without authority, alignment across orgs).

Controversial? Yes. Many engineers feel it’s unfair. You didn’t sign up to be a diplomat. You wanted to solve technical puzzles. But promotion is a change of job - not just a reward. The expectations differ.

Three domains every JavaScript engineer must develop to move up

Below are the practical, non-technical areas that hiring managers look for when evaluating candidates for lead or managerial roles.

1) Soft skills: communication, coaching, and culture

Communication: Clear, concise written and verbal communication reduces rework and misalignment. Engineers who can write a crisp RFC or a stakeholder-friendly status update are rare - and valuable.
Coaching and feedback: Managers must grow others. Being able to give feedback that is actionable and kind increases team velocity and morale.
Conflict resolution and psychological safety: Teams with high trust ship better. If you can surface hard topics, mediate disputes, and make teammates feel safe to raise concerns, you multiply impact.

Practical signals you’re doing this well:

You regularly pair or mentor junior engineers with measurable improvements in their output.
You lead blameless postmortems and enforce follow-through on action items.
You run productive async discussions (RFCs, PRs) with minimal churn.

2) Business acumen: product sense and outcome thinking

Product sense: Understanding user goals, trade-offs, and competitive context. This isn’t product management; it’s being able to make trade-offs that align engineering choices to user outcomes.
Metrics and outcomes: Know which metrics matter (activation, conversion, retention, performance metrics) and how your work moves them.
Prioritization: Ability to choose what not to build. Saying no is management work.

Practical signals:

You can explain how a technical change will move a business metric.
You’ve helped re-scope features to improve time-to-market with measured outcomes.
You propose experiments and can read their results.

3) Stakeholder management: influence, negotiation, and alignment

Influence without authority: Most cross-functional work relies on persuasion, not orders.
Managing up and across: Communicating risks to product, design, and execs in their language.
Expectation setting: Proactively communicating trade-offs, timelines, and confidence levels.

Practical signals:

You’ve negotiated delivery dates with product/design and met them consistently.
You’ve run cross-team initiatives where dependencies were identified and unblocked.
You can present technical trade-offs to executives in 3 slides or less.

How to show (not just claim) readiness for leadership

Managers hire for demonstrated impact. Here’s how to create evidence.

Own outcomes, not features
- Volunteer to own the success metric for a small product area.
- Track pre/post metrics and publish a short retrospective.
Mentor and scale your knowledge
- Run brown-bags, code katas, or a regular onboarding doc for newcomers.
- Capture mentee progress; quantify improvement when possible.
Lead cross-functional projects
- Start with a low-risk initiative (improve build times, reduce flaky tests) with measurable ROI.
- Document stakeholders, risks, mitigation, and results.
Improve the process
- Run retros, implement one new improvement, measure its effect.
- Reduce cycle time, improve deployment frequency or lower mean time to recovery.
Communicate wins and trade-offs
- Send concise async updates that show trade-offs made and why.
- Give exec-friendly summaries with top-line impact and next steps.

A practical 30/60/90 plan to start the transition

30 days - Observe and contribute

Shadow your manager in 1–2 meetings.
Volunteer to run a retro or an async RFC.
Start mentoring one junior engineer and have weekly check-ins.

60 days - Own small outcomes

Propose and lead a small cross-functional project with measurable success criteria.
Run one feedback session and one coaching conversation.
Create a short one-page summary demonstrating impact to stakeholders.

90 days - Scale influence

Present project results to stakeholders, including a clear before/after metric.
Coach at least two engineers for career growth and document improvements.
Have a candid career conversation with your manager: show artifacts and request explicit next steps for promotion.

Common objections - and how to respond

Objection: “I don’t want to stop coding.”

You don’t have to. Many leaders retain coding time. The role changes; you trade some individual output for multiplied team output.

Objection: “Managers don’t understand tech.”

Good managers seek technical credibility. The right path is a technical leader role (Tech Lead/Staff) or a manager who pairs with a senior engineer. Your job is to pick the path that fits your values.

Objection: “Soft skills can’t be taught.”

They can be practiced. Communication, feedback, negotiation - all improve with frameworks and deliberate practice.

Concrete exercises to build each skill quickly

Communication: Start a weekly “one-sentence update” practice and collect feedback. Practice writing an RFC and time yourself to be concise.
Coaching: Use the GROW model (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) in mentoring sessions. Track one mentee goal to completion.
Business sense: Attend product demos and write a short product teardown: what is the user problem, what is the value, what metrics matter.
Stakeholder influence: Run a 15-minute alignment meeting with product & design; prepare a 3-point decision plan and a fallback.

How to measure your progress (metrics that matter)

Team metrics: cycle time, lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery (MTTR).
People metrics: onboarding time, promotion rate of mentees, NPS or team engagement scores.
Business metrics: conversion lift, retention changes, revenue impact tied to your projects.

Quantify something. Then show it.

Resources and reading list

The Manager’s Path - Camille Fournier (practical guidance for engineering leaders): https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-managers-path/9781491973882/
Accelerate - Forsgren, Humble, Kim (metrics that correlate with high-performing teams): https://itrevolution.com/book/accelerate/
Harvard Business Review on influence and stakeholder management - start here: https://hbr.org/topic/leadership

A short checklist to use before applying for a management role

[ ] Have I led at least one cross-functional project with measurable outcomes?
[ ] Do I have at least two mentees with documented progress?
[ ] Can I explain how my work affected main business metrics in one slide?
[ ] Do I have feedback from peers and a manager demonstrating coaching ability?
[ ] Have I run retros and delivered process improvements with measured effects?

Final note - the real “gap” you should care about

Technical skill is your foundation. Soft skills, business acumen, and stakeholder management are the scaffolding that lets you build something bigger. Learn them. Practice them. Measure them. Promotion isn’t a reward for being excellent at code. It’s a reassignment of responsibility: from crafting solutions yourself to enabling others to create better outcomes.

Make that shift intentionally. Influence multiplies code. And influence is a skill you can, and must, cultivate.