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I think I disagree on the "managers don't author features" part. This is leadership 101. Don't ask anyone on your team to do anything you wouldn't (or couldn'
by sharker8 6y ago
I think I disagree on the "managers don't author features" part. This is leadership 101. Don't ask anyone on your team to do anything you wouldn't (or couldn't) do yourself. Maybe you have 10 years of experience authoring features other places and now you're above that. But what if the place you are now in charge of is so broken features couldn't get released even if you knew how to build them? You're basically going to blame your subordinate individual contributors' skill set or motivation or something. Without trying it yourself, you won't see how broken it actually is.
- ashtonkem 6y agoThis is complicated, and depends both on the strength of the team and the history of the manager. On one hand, in many teams the manager is still in a semi-engineering role, and might be the most experienced member of the team. On top of that knowledge of the roadmap is quite the advantage when coding, since you have a lot more context around requirements. On the other hand, there’s a lot of systemic risk in managers deciding which stories they themselves are going to execute on. There is a nasty temptation for the most interesting and/or difficult tasks to get self-assigned to the manager, which creates a silo and stifles team growth. Personally I do much more hands on early during my time with the team, and during swarms. But in general I tend to stay a bit more hands out and focus on the things that only I can do for the team.