Managment

I’ve written previously about my thoughts on team structure. I’m a fan of product-centric teams – multidisciplinary teams that embed members from functional groups on the same team, all working together to create and ship a software product.

You work in an organization that sets some high-level goals. Your team might be accountable for some of those goals. However, to hit the goals, you’ll need cooperation from groups outside of your team.

I’ve been an Engineering Manager for a while now, but for many years I filled a Developer role. I have done a lot of coding over the years. I still try to do a little coding every now and then. Because of my past as a developer, I could be oppressive to senior developers on my teams. When making decisions, I found myself providing both the management viewpoint and the technical viewpoint. This usually means I was keeping a perfectly qualified technical person from participating at a higher level of responsibility. This creates an unhealthy technical organization with limited career growth opportunities.

I have ended up managing people at the last three places I’ve worked, over the last 18 years. I can honestly say that only in the last few years have I really started to embrace the job of managing. Here’s a collection of thoughts and observations:

I have been lucky to build software products for a few different companies, each with a distinct culture. It’s help me form opinions about people, tools and processes that make teams effective at shipping software products.