Two years and a half ago I accepted a position as an IT Manager. Before that I was working on different technology companies with positions like developer, devops, software architect and technical lead. Since 2013 also working on positions that involved different levels of management, always technical and working mainly with remote teams
These are some notes about my learnings on the path to become a better manager (work in progress), personal experience and challenges
Focus on your team
Your team is your most precious treasure
Well, maybe gollum is an exaggeration. But we will work every day, face challenges and share hard work loads to meet our goals together
In that context you should spend an appropiate and continuous time building the team, looking for and hiring new team members, understanding interests, strong points, areas of improvement and grow interests. Teaching but most important, learning from your team and growing togheter
A continuous work to promote and build a culture of collaboration and feedback
The faster you understand and put the appropiate focus on this the sooner you will avoid potentially complex situations or understand problems related to internal organization
In my case I had to build a team almost from the ground up. Although I put focus on it, I wish I had put more focus since the beginning
Focus on your business
Start to learn and put focus on your business is key to understand priorities. Say yes to every other team backlog or initiative can make people happy at first but clearly doesn’t scale and sooner than later can make your team struggle to achieve goals agreed
This is specially true in complex environments, businesses with different possibilities or semi urgent needs and different possibilities to explore limited only by the current ability to execute them and the existing solution
Put continuous focus on the business your team is supporting will help you create a complete picture on time, understand and align priorities and see grow opportunities in the future
Stay technical
We are not talking about coding new features or reviewing every pull request. This is about understand key aspects of the existing solution or the solution you are building. At least general knowledge and be able to recognize main components, strong points and limitations
The team is most probably mainly composed by developers with technical ambitions. Go technical will also definitely help you understand their interests and help them grow on their careers (and in my case learn)
Sometimes it is difficult to find the time but this is important. These are skill I found underated sometimes, but I think this definitely make us more effective, better at our work
Don’t rush
In my case I fell into the trap of understimate things at first. As the majority of the team members were seniors developers, I thought an almost plug & play environment would be possible, where we could work on challenging goals almost inmediately
The truth is that there is a fixed amount of time you can’t avoid. Ramp up, time to generate synergies, to find strong points, to identify people that work very well together and people who not that much, etc
You can’t avoid this and time will take care of putting you in the right place if you for example agreed a challenging quarter objective with a team in his first stages of development and consolidation
It takes time
To build a team, for leaders to emerge, to get a critical mass of results, this is a long term investment. And with most long term investment we could go through dark moments of uncertainty. Having mentors, leaders is key here to help us see the long-term goal. Patience and re investmentment
Personal challenges
Every story is different. In my case the technologies were different also my past experience were mostly in another type of companies and solutions. Where there was no product or at least not so huge, critical and thought long term and in scale
The following topics are all still work in progress:
Culture: totally underrated by me. It took me time to understand how people work, interactions, time, expectations, how things are done
Understand who is who: who to talk, critical paths, how to successfully complete an initiative on time creating bridges instead of getting close to burning them
Build a team: another topic completeley underrated by me. It took me time and hard work to find good people and also another not insignificant amount of time for the ramp up and get them feel confident and confortable. In another companies I worked before there was a separated team dedicated to hiring. Here it also exists but you are supposed to be hunting people. Initially it was a shock for me, mainly because of the extra work, but now it makes complete sense to have responsibility since the beginning in the team that we put together and with which we are going to work every day
Understand technologies: technologies and many technical topics were taken for granted. With a different technical background it took me time (and still takes) to catch up
Generate critical mass results: It takes time to get a critical mass results, no shortcuts here. At least not for me, it took me time and a lot of help to get tangible results
Final thoughts
Some of the topics mentioned were known but completely underrated by me, others I learnt in the process basically through mistakes. For example trying to compare and match your team in structure, capacity and results with another team in a different level of evolution. Maybe with 3 or 5 more years than yours
Hope someone in a similar career stage would find some of these topics useful. In my case what worked or (through mistakes) now I know will be more effective is to get focus on your team, take challenges according to their size and evolution stage, understand the business and with patiente invest and re invest thinking long term and expecting concrete results maybe several quarters later
Now I can tell I am very happy and thankful with the team I work with. About accepting this challenge. For the path traveled and the learning. I feel that I am in the big leagues! learning from exceptional people and in that context is a huge motivation to me what still remains to be learned