I learned the most important lesson I ever learned about management from my father: “Always work to make yourself obsolete.”

As manager of the software development team here at FreshBooks, it’s my job to make sure the team doesn’t need me anymore. That means, exactly as you suggest, that I need to help them learn to be self-sufficient.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect to be able to teach EVERYONE on your team to be a good PM. Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone is suited to do that. What you CAN do, though, is (besides improving the feedback loop as you suggest) work too create an environment where honesty is fostered, so that team members feel free to say what they see, regardless of whether or not it aligns with the other team members’ opinions.

This takes immense personal integrity and determined effort. It’s not easy and it’s certainly something I’m still trying to teach myself to do, but I don’t believe there is any other option. As the world changes around us, the basic values of honesty, good data and clear communication will never go out of style.

Great post! Very useful information and I can relate to everything you said. I’ve been trying to move my development team towards Agile-ish practices but it’s definitely a hurdle when you’re working in a quasi-government, enterprisey organization.

Hopefully, I’ll get the chance to build another team with my startup and take some of this solid advice and use it.

Cheers,
Garry

Nice post!

The challenges you mention are all too common. Thankfully there are people who have thought long and hard about this. More importantly, they have empirically evolved practices and ways of thinking that address these issues. I believe that agile/lean practices provide a framework that can work for any software team.

One of the most important principles is self-organizing teams. Empower the team to work in ways that they feel are effective. Work as a team so that there is alignment around business value, quality, development practices and social interactions. I have written a white paper on agile adoption that you may find interesting: http://dpwhelan.com/blog. I know that you are already quite agile at well.ca so adopting agile practices need not be a hurdle. Rather, you can draw on what others are done to help resolve challenges you face in ways proven ways.

Much of what is in the agile/lean literature you may already do based on intuition or experience. For instance, your idea for trying different design approaches is a great approach and Toyota refers to this as “set based engineering” and they do this all the time! When you find such a match it is reaffirming. When you find suggestions that you did not know of you can consider whether it might work for you. The practices have been placed in a pattern format so that you see if the context and forces match your situation and make informed decisions about applying them.

OK, I will get off my soapbox and offer to share some of this with your team … I’m just down the road and would love to do this!

Cheers,

Declan