What appears easy to you not be so trivial for your engineering team. Everything looks doable until you’re the one responsible for implementing the idea. I have a system in production that generates a spreadsheet. A customer asked to merge data from multiple sources like Facebook and Twitter into the same workbook. Very reasonable request, […]
Zorb not umbrella
Next time you encounter a manager at a cocktail party, ask what they do for their team. You might get a response like, “I’m a crap umbrella.” Imagine crap falling from the sky and the heroic (in their minds) manager steps up with a giant umbrella to block it from falling on the team. A […]
Defeating Captain Hindsight
Production breaks. The team scrambles to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Everyone’s got a few ideas how to solve this. You’re responding to angry emails from upper management why production isn’t ready yet. Meanwhile a customer notices the error and sends a nasty email threatening to switch to a more […]
Don’t ask for daily status – talk to a stuffed bear
Do you feel overwhelmed keeping track of everyone’s status? Daily updates and stand-ups never worked for me. I don’t have time to check up on everyone and progress at a B2B company doesn’t change every 24 hours. Even asking for an emailed daily status seemed inefficient. Often I’d observe the same status “working on X […]
Managing something you didn’t create
My friend was frustrated, “I have no control!” He was given the opportunity to learn management and wondered, “How do you manage something that you didn’t even build?” My friend had a tech lead or manager spec all the work he had to do. As long as his test suites passed, he was doing his […]
Rockstor – managing an open source community
My friend Suman started an open source project called Rockstor back in January 2013. Rockstor lets you create your own personal cloud service. Small businesses like law firms or clinics utilize Rockstor to keep their data offline. Suman has been keeping me in the loop about Rockstor, and I realized I could write about his experience managing […]
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