Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams)
Learning how to manage is a long race - it takes many years and each lap offers new learnings. Along the way, anchors emerge that can help orient a manager when a number of other variables are in flux.
Below we offer a number of these anchors. They are based on philosophy, experience, and analysis; we hope they’ll be of some use.
Being a manager often means having privileged information. However, some may think that means they must occasionally lie. That is a mistake.
Management is a skill that requires always telling the truth, but not every truth you know. One easy way to avoid lying is to be clear that you can’t answer a question, whether it’s the answer someone wants or not.
“Listen, you know I wouldn’t be able to answer that question even if it was the case. Let’s talk about your concerns though.”
Pages during the workday are somewhat unavoidable - high speed teams will make mistakes that need to be reverted. However, outside business hours, your team should not be making changes to production. Therefore, issues should be rare. Aim for an average of 0 off-hours pages a week to know your team is prioritizing fixing causes of pages. And remember - stop writing great runbooks.
