Common sense suggests that a manager should know something about the thing they are managing, no? I was asked recently to take over a team that owns the databases for the fast growing cloud storage provider, Wasabi, and found myself in the midst of pivotal decisions that will determine if the company can evolve its technology to enable order-of-magnitude scaling and new business opportunities. The lessons about how to manage the team, how to manage up, and how to make these technical decisions should be helpful to many others facing challenges with their database technology. Spoiler: I didn’t have to write a line of SQL.