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Ask Slashdot: Transitioning From Developer To Executive?
First time accepted submitter fivevibe writes "I'm about to switch from a position where I did hands on development to one where I will be building and managing technical team. I will be responsible for designing and implementing the company's overall tech strategy. I am excited about this move but also nervous. It will require a different focus than I had up to this point, different skills, and different orientation. What should I be learning, reading, thinking about in order to make this transition successfully and avoid growing pointy hair?"
I have found it is a very good exercise to let the programmers tell me how long it is going to take to get the job done. We do it in a group setting with all the peers involved. The programmers don't want to look bad among their peers so they usually set realistic dates and work hard to meet them. Each week we review progress in a group setting. This seems to work very well.
One key thing to understand is that right now you are great with technology, but management isn't about technology. It's about people. The people you manage, your peers and leaders in other areas of the organization. People can be a lot harder to figure out than technology.
My advice is this.
1. Read "Behind Closed Doors". Probably the best book I read as a new manager. Wish I had read it before I made the leap. http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Closed-Doors-Management-Programmers/dp/0976694026/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324299173&sr=1-3
2. The best part of my day was working with the techies I managed. Listen to them, make time for them, and stay as closed to what they are building as possible. But also remember you are their boss. You will have to force them to make bad technical choices to meet a deadline, and will have to ask them to work nights and weekends. Make sure it is mutual respect, but at the end of the day your word has to be final.
3. Understand how the company makes money. Not just selling a product or service, but really learn this. Because at the end of the day, if a company doesn't make money it will cease to be. This is valuable to learn because the more you can translate how your team fits into the revenue stream, the better leverage you will have. For example, there are two ways to look at how a team "adds value". You will either directly participate in the revenue stream, being on a product team, e-commerce, etc. Or you will be involved with "cost avoidance", meaning the company is spending less because of your efforts. This can be either time savings or accuracy improvements. The later is not too hard to quantify. If you know how many hours are saved in a process you write, add up the salaries of those who did that process, subtracting the salaries of your team. For example, if you save 100 people an hour a day with your process, with each person making minimum wage ($7.25). There are an average of 260 work days per year. This translates into 100 * 260 * 7.25 = $185,000 in savings per year. If you have one full time employee supporting the app, at 80k per year, your application is saving the company ~ 100k per year. Now of course this does not include hardware, software, training, donut expenses. It's not intended to. It is intended to get people's attention, justify funding for your team, and facilitate you getting more in next year's budget.
4. Keep good notes. You may become an Outlook operator in your new line of work. Be sure to keep important emails that record decisions. Send out your understanding of a meeting after the meeting to make sure everyone heard the same thing as you. Keep a notebook or tablet and take tons of notes in meetings. If you are in several meetings per day it can be very easy to forget who said what when. This can be important when decisions are questioned later on. Or if things go bad, accountability can be shared among the entire executive team and not focused as the new manager.
5. Hire really good people. Know that interviews are about finding the right fit for a team as well as their technical abilities. If you do this right, the rest of your work-live is exponentially easier. Ask good questions, do quizes and tech screenings. Listen to the questions a candidate asks. But trust your gut instincts.
Bottom line is remember to keep your sense of humor and humility. This can be one of the most challenging and rewarding things you will ever do, managing others. You are their boss, responsible for their work lives, and a major influencer of their personal lives and financial futures.