BIW16: Meetings About Spreadsheets: Lessons From My First Six Months As A Tech Manager
- 1. MEETINGS ABOUT SPREADSHEETS Lessons from my first 6 months as a tech manager Alex C. Viana Terbium Labs
- 3. SOME CONTEXT Started at Terbium Labs September, 2014. (3 employees) Transitioned to VP of Engineering in April, 2016. (14 employees) Currently 18 employees with 9 in engineering including a CTO. Responsibilities include those of a personnel manager, product manager, QA manager, release manager, and senior engineer
- 4. INTRO “The goal of teaching is to pass on what we know faster than we learned it” 1. Get out of the way. 2. It’s your job to answer questions. 3. Answer questions with process. 4. Take out the garbage.
- 5. GET OUT OF THE WAY The first and best piece of advice I got. You will block on every time-sensitive technical task you take on. You need to get out of the way and let your engineers do their work. Good news! You can now build those fun non-critical tools for your team on your down time. You will feel unproductive but it’s not your job to just write code anymore. What should you be doing instead?
- 6. ANSWER QUESTIONS LIKE IT’S YOUR JOB Hint: It is your job. You need to be able to answer or find the answer to any question from your technical team. And answer in context of how it relates to tech, staffing, product, sales, marketing, QA, etc. This means you’re going to have to go to “meetings about spreadsheets” to know what going on across the company. How can you reduce the number of question and get back to your sweet sweet code?
- 7. LET QUESTIONS DRIVE PROCESS Bad news, you’re going to start talking like a manager. When questions arise think about why they needed to be asked in the first place? Why wasn’t this written down? Why wasn’t this already communicated? Why is this being done in different ways? Can someone take the lead on this? You now get to engineer process instead of just code.
- 8. TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE Taking out the garbage is a bummer. A house full of garbage is worse. Schedule (and stick to) doing recurring tasks that are only manageable if doing regularly. Going through your issue backlog and PRs. Planning your sprints. Meet with other teams and give updates Checking in with your developers and giving feedback.