[trestletech]

The biggest piece of advice I'd give is to focus on practicing leadership in your current role. Develop a reputation as the person who ensures that work gets done properly, leads out in process improvements for the team, and demonstrates good judgment. Once you've done that, it will be a no-brainer to give you more leadership and/or management opportunities. Note that none of these practices require that you get a promotion first nor that you be the strongest programmer in the room.

I went through a similar transition years ago and I've started working on writing up some of my advice here. It's still quite incomplete, but might give you some ideas: https://app.tettra.co/teams/rstudio/pages/technical-leadersh... In particular, I'd say the "Technical Team Lead" role is what I'd target as your next step.

Aside: if any of this advice resonates with you, we are hiring and I'd love to chat about helping you go through this transition with us.