Management Principles​

This page’s objective is collecting and summarizing my beliefs about what constitutes good management.
It’s by definition a work in progress, that gets updated based on new experiences, observations and insights I encounter in my career.

Problem Solving

  • You are there to help the team members solve their issues. You are not there to spur them, or to give motivational speeches. If you are not working daily to help them solve issues, you are an expendable paper pusher
  • Your title is Chief Roadblock Remover
  • How does the team work? You need to remove inefficiencies from their processes
  • If the team is not effective, you need to find the resources to make it so
  • The team needs to be able to focus as close to 100% on their work as possible. You need to shield them from unneeded distraction and dilution

Structure & Direction

  • Establish frameworks to work with
  • Aggressively establish priorities (sprint > quarter > strategy)
    • Brainstorm each quarter, build backlog (relevant in the immediate future) + icebox (cool but not immediately relevant); relevancy is determined by alignment with business strategy and impact on team’s KPIs. Review the quarterly backlog on a monthly basis. Execute it via biweekly sprints. Check sprints’ status, team’s blockers & team alignment on priorities weekly
    • Score projects as (business value / complexity). Value = expected impact, complexity = required effort
    • An “everything is urgent” situation results in working on non-important things; if priorities are not extremely clear, your team’s limited time is misallocated
    • Framework (needs to become a regular habit): brainstorm for backlog building; problem-hypothesis-prediction; prioritization with scores; KPIs; MVP/MVT; analyze; systemize
    • Need to push back whenever an external request is misaligned with current backlog
    • Emergencies are by definition rare events. If emergencies become regular, it means there’s either a management problem (bad prioritization or inherent lack of proactivity), a leadership problem (bad relationship with middle managers, that forces them to be reactive rather than proactive), or a hiring problem (team is understaffed). Until the problem gets solved by changing the management, changing the leadership, or hiring more, the backlog will just keep being disrupted and the team’s performance will always be subpar vs. its potential
  • No ownership overlaps. Once the ownership is established, the owner is the one expected to carry the project. The ownership can be re-discussed in follow-up talks if the owners themselves want to, or if the manager spots some obvious blockers arising. In any circumstance, discussing it with the owner is paramount before having anyone else being assigned to the same project, or having anyone else touching the project and making changes (manager included). Not doing so is one of the worst things a manager can do, as it directly undermines the sense of autonomy, trust, and professionalism in the employee
  • Overcommitment is just as bad as undercommitment. Employees who constantly take on more and more work outside the scope of their weekly priorities or their role need to be stopped and forced to focus on their priorities to excel in those. Too many managers don’t recognize this problem. Overcommitment is not a sign of leadership, it’s actually the opposite. Overcommitting employees work more but are less focused, less organized, and create unneeded ownership overlaps and team conflicts
  • Stable pace of delivery. This is essential to being in proactive rather than reactive mode, as it makes the team feel empowered and in control of their output. Momentum is extremely important
  • People and outcomes over processes. Processes need to be adapted to the team’s needs and business outcomes rather than being a box-ticking exercise to rigidly apply practices. The goal of any process is optimizing towards business outcomes, not towards a dogmatic process setup or towards increasing meta-work
  • Flexibility and allocating a percentage of the week’s time (e.g. 20%) to free, unstructured, creative work
  • Ensuring the team has enough non-fractured blocks of time to be allocated to deep work is essential
  • Daily stand-up meetings are inefficient and should be avoided. Nobody gets value from having their time blocked to hear about other people’s updates. They also feel like micromanagement. Whenever a team member is blocked, has doubts, or needs alignment, s/he can communicate this asynchronously, ask for an ad hoc call with the team, or during a 1to1. If a team member regularly fails to meet weekly/biweekly deadlines, it’s up to his/her manager to notice it and work on it on an individual basis; no point imposing micromanagement on an entire team to fix something that isn’t broken

Meetings

  • The Information Age has made asynchronous communication possible. Keeping old-world processes in place even if new tech is freely and easily available is the single most common root of inefficiency. Taking advantage of asynchronous communication is the high-impact quickest win you have
    • Rule: any communication that can be done asynchronously (email, Jira, Slack), should be done asynchronously
  • Rule: anything that can be better communicated with a dashboard than with an email or slide, should be communicated with a dashboard
  • Meetings practices need to be constantly questioned – their goals need to be clear and the processes need to have a reason:
    • Do we need a daily meeting? Why? Do we need a weekly meeting? Why? Do we need a monthly meeting? Why?
    • Alignment: how does update communication happen in our team? Why?
    • How do you update stakeholders? Do you send a weekly or monthly email, or do you create a dashboard? Why?
  • Meetings should be used only for the most difficult discussions, that can’t possibly be done asynchronously
    • Forcing people to participate in meetings to give status updates generates poor quality updates, lots of dissatisfaction due to wasting e.g. 1 hour (the whole meeting’s length) just to talk for 2 mins, and uninterest in listening to the other 58 mins of other people’s updates
    • Always keep in mind the real amount of resources that a meeting consumes: a 1 hour call with 5 people doesn’t consume 1 hour, but 1*5 = 5 hours
  • During a stakeholder meeting, the team must not be represented by the project itself, or by its manager. The team is composed by people, and each of them needs to be specifically and appropriately credited for the work done

Career & Communication

  • Ensuring to give visibility and credit to team’s members when communicating with stakeholders
    • This generates the correct incentives. If this happens, the team members will be happy to work with their manager, and to do the work that will grant them visibility
  • Whenever communicating a decision taken by leadership, or the need for something to be done, a manager who says “important person X said so” communicates s/he’s a pure intermediary with zero added value. If the added value of the manager is not clear, it implies that role should actually be eliminated to maximize efficiency
    • The team needs to see with their own eyes that you defend them when needed, and push back against unrealistic demands, even when it’s a lost battle
  • The best way to describe a problem is to make it clear you want to be a part of the solution. When you communicate a problem, you need to show you’ve been proactive in identifying and analyzing it first, there must be data backing you up (no space for “I feel like this might be a problem”), and you also need to have some suggested solutions
  • Promoting the team’s members
    • Performance Review systems exist to force managers to avoid gut feelings and personal biases, and to make the promotion process as neutral and quantified as possible. Adopting such tools only “esthetically” and not actually using them the way they are supposed to be used when taking decisions for salary increases and promotions is the quickest way to lose the team’s trust and destroy their motivation; it will also incentivize them to play political games rather than being productive and outcome-driven, and to backstab one another rather than being cooperative and aligned with business goals
    • There should be zero surprises during a Performance Review. What is going to get each team member a low, average or high rating during the next Performance Review should be discussed regularly during 1:1s
  • Finding opportunities for team members
  • Build connections with other teams and identify bridge figures in yours
  • Ensure team’s communication is clear and effective

Culture

  • Motivation comes from three elements: autonomy, mastery, purpose (see Drive, by Daniel H. Pink); these three elements should be the north star of any management culture
  • Create a culture of honesty and trust: no false promises
  • Create a culture of transparency: all important communication needs to be public (e.g. Slack channels), not happening in private chats; if some employees discussed important points in a private chat, they need to immediately summarize them as a public post for the team’s visibility
  • Data-driven over gut feelings
  • Experimentation; roadmap for experiments, budget allocated exclusively for experiments
  • Ownership of wins and failures
  • Competition is outside, not inside; employees who try to take over other employees’ roles need to be immediately stopped
  • Frameworks exist to speed up decision-making, avoid missing details, and reduce/avoid personal biases and politics
  • Informal chats during breaks are the most important factor for team building. Important work decisions can actually also happen during informal chats rather than meetings, especially if there are newcomers in the group (they speak up less easily in meetings due to pressure); not understanding human psychology can lead to think team building requires organizing over-the-top activities – in reality, making good use of coffee and lunch breaks is what you need
  • It’s important to celebrate victories. Ensure that whenever something important has been accomplished, credit is given where due and a moment is taken to celebrate the success. A team can’t have a constant stream of difficult days/weeks, the stream needs to be broken whenever a milestone is reached
    • You don’t need more budget in order to celebrate; you can find low budget creative ways to do it. The important thing is breaking the stream
  • It’s important to allocate time for retrospectives whenever something did not go the way it was planned. The goal of retrospectives is not to blame someone (no names should be mentioned during one), it’s learning what went wrong and what could have been done better (everyone needs to understand this very clearly; there’s no space for people getting blamed, sacrificing to take the blame, or getting offended). Most of the time, mistakes stem from something structural in the process that needs to be fixed, and not from the action of a single specific person. Avoiding retrospectives for the fear of possible confrontations is a costly mistake. A no-retrospective culture is a no-improvement culture