HACKER Q&A
📣 someoneishere

What to do now I'm a manager?


I've been managing a small team <10 people. I've cleaned up the team, got them motivated and organised to a point they are driving themselves forward. Now I want to look at what I can do next to improve myself which in turn can improve the team and hopefully get me noticed a little more to take on some more people/teams.

Can anyone recommend any courses, training or books that you would recommend or have found invaluable in your time in a management role. (Any course or certification recomendations like MBA's, etc would be great!)

  👤 alexgaribay Accepted Answer ✓
I became a manager back in August. I took SNYAM (So Now You're A Manager) training shortly after becoming a manager. I found it 100% worth the cost. Jen, trainer, goes through what you need to know to start becoming a successful manager, things that I hadn't thought about or considered when I become a manager. My team definitely noticed an improvement in my managing ability.

The next cohort takes place mid-March. https://www.beplucky.com/pluckyevents/snyam-12/

👤 austincheney
How is your documentation and writing? Rarely have I seen corporate software teams get this even remotely competent. Its generally so bad, in fact, that in my prior organizations they deferred almost all technical writing to QA personnel and product owners, because they couldn't trust the developers or the technical leadership to produce anything intelligible.

Here is a brief checklist of things to focus on communicating value:

* Purpose - What would ya say you do here?

* Measures - How do you measure success in numbers?

* Product Goals - What are the very specific and quantifiable goals of the current project/product?

* Product/Development Alignment - What is your approach to align the work to the business? Be short and specific. Don't say Agile or any jargon bullshit.

* Personnel Alignment - How many people do you need doing which jobs and how do you justify that in hours and dollars? This should be driven by the business requirements and not some developer's bullshit technical requirements.

The reason these things are important is that the higher your rise the further you move away from the granularity of the actual work. You need to clearly understand business organization and how to organize teams opposed to individual developers. Developers are just resources (numbers) and a collection of those resources are a team, but those resources are interchangeable because what is most important is shipping a product and penetrating a market.

👤 JSeymourATL
Paid to Think: A Leader's Toolkit for Redefining Your Future > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13236274-paid-to-think

New questions force you think differently.

👤 tmaly
I really enjoyed The One Minute Manager book.

Its a simple framework, and it is easy to remember.

👤 machtesh
It sounds like you're doing a great job so far. Maybe you could use a coach to get you to the next step. We provide that: https://LeadingUp.co
👤 muzani
Recommended books:

* Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

* Only The Paranoid Survive, Andy Grove

These are CEO level material but some are applicable to managers too.