Stretch 2013: The role of the manager in modern tech organizations
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Transcript of Stretch 2013: The role of the manager in modern tech organizations
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The role of the manager in modern tech organizations
Stretch, Budapest, December 6, 2013 Andreas Ehn <[email protected]>
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CEO CTO
Dev Dev Dev DesignerTeam lead
VP Eng
VP Prod
Chief architect
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CTO!• An architect, a thinker, a researcher, a
tester and a tinkerer!• “Usually can’t manage their way out of
a paper bag, but have huge vision, the ability to pull an all-nighter and crank out a rough prototype, have the unique ability to translate complex/abstract thoughts into simple English for a non-technical end-user, and a willingness to get up in front of 1,000 people and talk about the latest greatest thing they are working on/thinking about”!
• Happy to work collaboratively with the VP Engineering while leaving the engineering team completely alone
VP Engineering!• Runs the engineering team on a day-
to-day basis!• Process/management gods (and
goddesses)!• Totally focused on building and
shipping products!• Should have an engineering
background, but isn’t necessarily the strongest tech person on the team
Fred Wilson: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/10/vp-engineering-vs-cto.html!Brad Feld: http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2007/10/cto-vs-vp-engineering.html
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CEO CTO
Dev Dev Dev DesignerTeam lead
VP Eng
VP Prod
Chief architect
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Communication
Prioritization
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The traditional manager
• Makes most decisions by him-/herself
• Over-specifies
• Tells you what to do in detail
• Tells you when it should be done or, at best, requires you to say when it will be done
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The problem
• Generalists without a lot of domain knowledge make most decisions
• Little room for experimentation
• No validation of different options against real data
• Communication is highly directed and often inefficiently routed
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What to do instead?
• Decentralize • Enable and empower
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Decentralize• Push decisions
“downwards” • Empower individuals
and small teams to make decisions and build end-to-end features
• At the most, decide on what, never how
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Enable and empower
• Be a problem solver, remove blockers
• Channel communication with other parts of the organization
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Problems (and solutions)• Expectations – very important to
manage expectations for the rest of the organization
• Consistency – have architect and UX roles that span across teams
• Focus – clearly define, explain and argue for the company vision; convince rather than force
• Stay the course on the vision, but experiment on the implementation
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Minimum viable features• Experimentation is only
feasible if tested/validated against reality frequently
• Short iterations; well defined, testable goals
• Readjust course quickly • Easier to keep the rest
of the org up to speed
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Avoiding getting stuck in a local maximum
• How do you avoid limiting yourself to a hill-climbing approach that risks getting stuck in a local maximum?
• Allow for a bit of craziness – injecting randomness into the system
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Hacking
• Hack days, hack weeks, 20% time
• Maybe all the time should be for hacking?
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Is anyone really doing this?
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Haier without middle management
• Now Zhang Ruimin, who turned the company into its current success, has eliminated the firm’s entire middle management
• “In the past, employees waited to hear from the boss; now, they listen to the customer.”
• The firm’s 80,000 employees are now organized into 2,000 zi zhu jing ying ti (ZZJYTs): self-managed teams that perform many different roles. Each is responsible for profit and loss, and individuals are paid on performance
• “An unsteady and dynamic environment is the best way to keep everyone flexible.”
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CERN• Goals are well defined (find the
Higgs boson), but not the way to get there; individual design decisions are put off for as long as possible, which lets the project “absorb uncertainty”
• Teams with rival proposals spar publicly, forcing all the boffins to articulate their assumptions, justify their choices and learn enough about their rivals’ ideas to criticize them at length
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But…• Is it easier for companies
that have a perfect fit between what developers and customers want (GitHub, Valve) than for companies building for a different audience (Stardoll, Wrapp)?
• How to achieve product–market fit? VP Product as translator?
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