From Individual Contributor to Leader: Boomie Odumade on What Nobody Tells You
One of the most clarifying workshops from the 2026 AdaMarie Career Navigation Summit is now available inside the AdaMarie Professional Network. Here’s what you’ll take away from it and how to watch the full session.
Somewhere around the senior level, a lot of us are quietly handed a choice we’re never really taught how to make: do you want to become a leader? It arrives looking like a promotion with more money, a better title, the next rung up. Boomie Odumade’s workshop exists to correct that framing before you make the leap.
Leadership, she argues, isn’t a promotion or a checkbox. It’s a completely different job category, and going in without understanding that is how good engineers end up unhappy.
Boomie brings 20 years of people leadership to the question, across engineering and executive roles, which means she’s not speaking in abstractions. The value of this session is that it makes the invisible parts of leadership visible . If you’ve ever wondered what a manager actually does all day, or why some weeks of leadership feel productive and others feel like you got nothing done, this is the conversation that answers it honestly.
Rather than talk about leadership in theory, Boomie walks through how her own working weeks changed across three stages of her career, from writing code full-time to leading while still hands-on, to running a department with little coding at all.
Watch and you’ll come away with a clear vocabulary for the shift and a realistic preview of the mindset changes that trip new leaders up: the way success stops being something you can check off a list, the discomfort of delegating work you could do faster yourself, and the strange reality that some of your biggest wins will be completely invisible to everyone around you.
Boomie is clear that your career doesn’t have to be linear, that stepping back from leadership is a legitimate choice, and that there’s now a real path to grow as a senior individual contributor without ever managing people.
If you’re standing at that fork — or expect to be soon — this is 25 minutes that could save you from taking a job you didn’t actually want.
Watch the full workshop inside the APN
Boomie’s complete session, including her three-stage breakdown of a leader’s week and the full set of mindset shifts, is available now in the AdaMarie Professional Network, alongside every other session from this year’s summit.
Inside, you’ll find:
The full summit replay library, including the sessions you couldn’t catch live
Live workshops and expert conversations year-round
Our spring Career Accelerator
A growing library of career resources
A Slack community full of people navigating their next steps right alongside you
