Managing a software team requires patience. Apart from business knowledge, you need to understand the pain points of your developers too. Throughout my journey at Simform, I have faced many challenges while managing my team of developers. Today I am sharing my 15 years of experience so that you don’t need to go through sleepless nights trying to figure out how to manage a software development team.
Set your outlines clearly - Leverage project management software to clearly define all work requirements.
Know your employees closely - Every person has their own unique skill set. Conduct regular meetings and build close relationships with your employees to determine what they can bring to the table.
Learn, Grow, Repeat - If you are someone coming from a non-technical background, don’t self-doubt yourself. Instead, focus on learning the core concepts and fundamentals of software development.
Schedule regular 1:1 - Cut siloed communication. Having a PM is great, but if feasible, try making time for direct reporting. This way, you will be informed about the daily progress and know your developer's pain points.
Redefine developer’s KPIs - Know that software development is heavily focus oriented job. Developers need to think, iterate, debug and solve. You can’t measure their daily KPI by the number of code lines they wrote.
Leverage overlapping time zones - Working in a remote scenario? Plan out meetings and discussions during the overlapping time zones so that people don’t need to waste time waiting for other’s feedback and can work autonomously.
Avoid task switching - As previously mentioned, development is an attention-heavy task. Any disruption to their existing workflow will reduce their attention span, and they can’t focus on one solution at one time. This will result in poor performance.
Involve your team in decision-making - As a manager, you need to make decisions at every point. It's well known that people won’t agree with you all the time. Yet explaining your decisions to your team will allow them to ask cross-questions. Thorough explanations of such queries will ensure that everyone is on the same page and will help justify your future decisions.
Avoid micromanagement - Once you assign your employees their designated tasks, allow them to freely work as they seem fit. As a manager, your role is to encourage, coach, and support them.
Balance experienced and non-experienced developers - Junior developers require continuous mentoring and coaching. By building a team solely of junior developers, you would need to micromanage them at every single point. A balance between experienced and non-experienced developers will encourage independent research and continuous learning under mentorship.
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