Negative traits: stress management, conflict avoidance, control, information hoarding.
Management reward cycle is way longer than IC.
Foster ongoing management education & set-up some structured learning tips like reading groups, shadowing or mentorship training.
Again, management role !== promotion.
Interviewing managers
Steps:
Pre-screening.
Check references.
Prepare IC to interview managers.
On-board like IC to help know the tech stack.
5. People management at scale
Management at scale comes with different problems.
Improve managers with:
Providing a mentor.
Establish a learning program (book club also works).
Assign someone for management quality.
Tribal identities can occur. Invest in manager to manager relationship.
Look for opportunities for manager collaboration. EM forum collaboration for instance.
Measuring manager performance is really important.
Define expectations.
Gather data about the team to measure performance.
Skip-level and other meetings to gather frequent feedback.
Competition isn’t feedback.
Seek for performance, not likeability.
Underperformance
Handle with care, planning and adjusting when letting go a manager.
Morale under rapid growth
Prepare the team to face growth. Explain opportunities and tackle skepticism and potential issues (loss of autonomy, fewer opportunities with newer hires, etc.).
With growth can come a sense of having less impact and ownership.
Build empowerment from the bottom.
Focus failures on learning, not punishment.
Avoid formal processes that stop innovation.
Reward getting things done.
Let ICs work on what’s interesting for them.
“Team shopping” can be positive.
Work-life balance
Realistic, not arbitrary deadlines.
Leaders should be good examples.
Heroes are unhealthy for the teams.
Diversity
Participating in diversity hiring or activities can be a burden for underrepresented people.
Beware of environment and null process (absence of formal process).
Promote work-life balance and use metrics to surface bias.
Continuous learning
Ongoing education is key for good engagement and performance.
Learning budget, conferences, meetups, etc.
Mentoring is very effective for young leaders.
Retrospectives, post-mortems and cross training are good strategies for team learning.
Career development
Career path is critical when introducing formal management.
Consider separate tracks for IC/Management.
Levels can be tricky when they’re introduced. Slotting and promotion.
A promotion process is key for growth.
6. Scaling the organization: design principles
The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of communication and coordination necessary
— Mythical Man-Month
Avoid diseconomies of scale (hiring reduces output).
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation:
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
Organizing by skill-set is common in early stage.
Value Streams are affected after growing.
Goals while growing: move fast and connect employees to the product.
Principles:
Agile mindset.
Delivery teams (also, domains).
Autonomy.
Purpose and measure success.
Continuous value delivery.
Continuous learning culture.
Delivery teams
Can deliver 95% of backlog independently.
Cross knowledge, has all the necessary skill-set inside the team.
Embrace autonomy: motivation comes when they clearly understand the effect on customers. They have a good picture on whatever needs to be done.
Measure success & establish purpose: KPI team goals are fundamental. Go from company KPI to team KPI.
7. Scaling the organization: delivery teams
Can be build around: platform, features, company or customer.
Platform: it’s the easiest and works great on small companies. Does not scale well.
Features: scales very well. Can be difficult to handle growing amount of features without growing the team.
Company goals: keeps clear how to contribute. Can be difficult to scale.
Customer: develop for customer groups without dependencies. Clear alignment with customer needs. Hard to scale.
Value stream mapping
Can help improve existing suboptimal setups.
Good example of VSM from Phil Calçado p. 147.
From one team to two:
Beware of shared members when splitting teams (bus factor).
Sync between teams are good ways to avoid siloing.