When the VP of IT left, leadership asked me to step in while they searched for a replacement. Six months of overseeing both the application development team and the infrastructure team - 9 people total.
I'd been closely involved in most of the VP-level work for a while - budget planning, technical roadmap, cross-departmental coordination. What changed was being the final word. Every decision landed on my desk, and that included the hard ones - like letting people go when it was the right call for the team.
Managing two teams with different priorities meant finding the balance between keeping the lights on and moving the organization forward. I worked closely with leadership on the annual budget, vendor evaluations, and making sure both teams had what they needed without stepping on each other.