Delivery

Delivery is about commitment and negotiation. Smart development teams under commit and over deliver. This sets the team up for success and sets realistic expectations. Good product managers will have a backlog available for devs to pick up if work is finished early. “Bonus” work can be incentivized and is positive. Continuously over committing and under delivering ruins the morale of the team. Hard to keep a team positive if they are coming up short, quarter after quarter due to over committing.

Teams should not defer bugs and should avoid deferring requirements of an agreed upon feature. Code is never perfect and bugs happen, but bugs and missing requirements create technical debt, a debt no one wants to pay. Better to get it right or else expect more time, money and capacity spent later.

Path to successful delivery of commitments

• Let the team contribute when making commitments
• Fully understand and document the scope of the work being asked for. Spike unknowns and create a design doc for integrations
• Understand the capacity needed to accomplish the work and worst-case scenarios
• Frequently check-in with development managers and product management team
• Look for ways teams can optimize and document processes to eliminate churn and unknowns

Managing/Mentoring

As a leader, listening to the dreams and aspirations, concerns and disappointments of those who report to me is crucial to earning their respect and confidence. As a manager, establishing trust can provide motivation and makes asking others to complete tasks and be accountable for commitments much easier. As a mentor, my goal is success for individuals and success as a team. Fostering good team vibes and giving others the opportunity to lead and grow, get out of their comfort zone and challenge their strengths and weaknesses in a positive learning environment is key.

It's important to have a vision for why we are doing what we're doing. It's the managers role to clearly and frequently state the vision, assign goals, and explain why the work matters. When others are onboard and understand what needs to be done they can execute on that work.

Project Planning

Understanding the desired outcomes of the project, detailing why we're doing it and showing how it can be done via building a roadmap is how I've generally approached kicking off a project. These meetings typically involve stakeholders from product and engineering. The product team provides the detailed requirements for all of the known scenarios and engineering provides high level consultation and sometimes a flowchart showing how systems can be used to generate the required data.

Once a plan is defined, a high level LOE is given. The product team will work with engineering managers to write and groom all of the work tickets for the engineers to pick up and the work is prioritized and scheduled against any other work planned or in flight by the product manager. Once the work begins, the project is tracked with a status report published weekly.

Experience