Management

Managementese

One of my teams is facing a big fat decision regarding future product direction and the process has split the team in half the “Yes We Shoulds” and the “No Way in Hells”. The manager of the team is facing a minor rebellion and spending much of his time trying to drive the team towards… more

June 27, 2003 14 Comments

To-Do Lists

Somewhere between individual contributor and middle management, it became essential that I have a to-do list. I resisted this for years, secretly hoping that I could keep track of all the crap I needed to do in my head or an a conveniently located post-it note, but then stuff started spilling all over the floor… more

May 8, 2003 13 Comments

Definition of a Bad Bug

My favorite part of shipping a product is crunch time. It’s the month or so before a major release when you’ve acknowledged that you can no longer delay the inevitable — you must ship this product. What’s gratifying about crunch time is the velocity with which the product team moves. Decision-making occurs in the hallway.… more

April 10, 2003

Reorgs for the Average Joe

You’ve been here… You get a random email from your boss that you need to meet with him urgently at some odd hour of the day. You sit staring at the email, wondering what could be up. No rumors of layoffs are in the air… the company is hitting it’s number this quarter. You don’t… more

March 14, 2003 5 Comments

Delivering Big/Bad News

As a manager, at some point, you’re going to have to deliver news that is going to be of significant consequence to your employees. It’s likely to either be big news (“the team has been split into three and everyone you know is no longer on your team”) or it’s going to be bad (“we… more

March 9, 2003 7 Comments

Synchronicity

I build software for a living. I started out in quality assurance in the 80s and now I’m responsible for a reasonably large engineering organization tasked with developing four very different products. This week, the team sat down with the executives at the company and basically asked for several million dollars to finance the development… more

February 14, 2003 2 Comments

Engineering Management Interview Questions

A former employee recently asked, “What are questions you ask software engineering management candidates?” These questions really focus on the people-skills for managers. If you’re looking for technical questions, I highly recommend techInterview or stumbling around on Stack Overflow. Lead Off Questions: These are vanilla, boring questions which I use to begin to assess a… more

October 14, 2002 3 Comments

Surreal Meetings

At the new gig, everyone is sporting fancy laptops and the whole building is wired for 802.11b. This has some significant implications on the way work gets done in a meeting.

August 4, 2002 4 Comments