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From developer to PM in 90 days



Recently, a certain trend has been observed in IT. Startups neglect management, and all decisions are usually made by the founder. When a startup begins to grow, there is a need for new employees. And then urgently needed managers. The founder appeals for help to his best developer: “I'm in trouble. Can you manage this team instead of me? ”

David Loftesness , the former director of Twitter’s development, has been the developer many times, who has been addressed by six different IT companies over the past 20 years, including Xmarks and Geoworks. After several such transitions between the positions of the developer and the manager, Lofthesness began to help other developers in mastering their skills in senior positions.
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Not so long ago, he shared his experience in this area and made a 90-day plan for developers about to become managers. In this unique article, he describes in detail his plan with the aim of helping future managers with the ability to prioritize, maintain confidence and analyze the results of their work. So they will develop faster and begin to support other employees.

Why do you need a plan


“Everyone knows that many articles have been written on the topic of governance. However, it seemed to me that these articles not only contradict each other, but also miss key points, says Loftesness. - I wanted to create a time-limited plan that allows a person to choose whether to continue to develop as a manager or not. This is my approach to creating a 90-day plan that would help developers become successful leaders. ”

He decided to draw up this plan after he realized that IT companies are often forced to appoint their developers to senior positions (sometimes regardless of their opinions and work experience). On the one hand, a developer who becomes a manager already has in-depth knowledge of technology and business processes that play an important role in product development. However, such new managers, as a rule, have no idea how to manage people.

During the survey, Loftesness found out that, on average, only one of the 15 managers underwent planned training before becoming a leader. When answering the question about which methods turned out to be the most effective in training managers, almost 75% indicated a trial and error method, half referred to the feedback of their subordinates, and 40% said they watched other managers.

This coincides with the opinion of Loftesness himself: “When I first started working as a manager, at least for the first 6 months I simply repeated after others. Making up our schedule, I thought: "Probably, we need to hold meetings." And we began to hold meetings. Basically, I just copied everything that was happening around me. ”

What does this lead to? A team of developers begin to lead technical experts who have no management experience. Newly-minded managers often have to deal with an even more difficult situation, because they are appointed at the most inappropriate moment: when you need to take up an empty position, release a product without meeting the deadlines, or overcome a crisis in the company.

The 90-day Loftesness plan can help managers navigate a new position in three months. The plan consists of 3 stages: self-education (Days 1-30), search for one’s own rhythm (Days 31-60) and self-analysis (Days 61-90). But first of all, it is necessary to decide whether to become a manager at all. It is much more important (and entails more serious consequences) than many believe.

Day 0: Simple truths that you will have to accept


Most developers spend too much time programming, so they will never take on the leadership role if they are not appointed as such. Potential managers can only see managers with experience. “Over time, I realized that choosing such a developer should have an inner gut feeling,” says Loftesness. “But it will not bring any result if the future manager cannot mentally imagine himself in a completely new position for him far from the code.” Loftesness found out that the best young executives fully understand and accept this state of affairs.

The manager should be ready to act in three directions.

“About two years ago, one of our developers asked me:“ How do I understand that I’m ready? ”, Says Loftesness.

Before answering, he drew a small diagram:



“You will be ready when you finally realize that you will have to act in three different directions, and not just control the development team,” says Lofnessness.

Below are three of these areas, as well as questions to which every potential leader should know the answer:


In addition, Loftesness notes that the most successful leaders at the same time are able to follow the instructions of their boss, lead their team and interact with their colleagues. “Imagine that this is not a sequence of actions, but rather a list of tasks,” adds Loftesness. “You need to make sure that all three tasks in the list are completed: maybe not even immediately, but within the first 90 days.”

Determine in advance how your work will motivate you.

“This is a completely different job. Do not expect that as soon as you manage to complete several tasks, you will immediately be able to call yourself a manager, says Loftesness. - Now you are responsible for the welfare and effectiveness of your wards. You will be responsible for the results, but you will not be able to cope with everything alone. "

As a manager, you are not sitting in the passenger seat, but at the wheel. That should motivate you. If not, then maybe this job is not for you.

Before you take responsibility for other employees, you need to carefully analyze the reasons for which you are taking up this position. Tell yourself honestly what moves you. Loftesness saw good and bad intentions exalt or ruin novice managers. Here are some things to pay special attention to:

Do not become a manager to please your boss. “The desire to make your boss happy at the cost of your own well-being is not the best reason to take office,” Loftesness said. - It is not easy when your leader is your friend or former colleague. To start, think and ask yourself why you need it. ”

Do not become a manager to move up the career ladder. In many IT companies, career growth for developers and management goes hand in hand. “Well, if you want to lead a team. However, it is necessary to critically assess the situation: are you ready to accept this role now? If you take office too early and fail, then it will be a step back for you, not forward. ”

Do not become a manager "just for the sake of the team." If before you played the role of a martyr, then you had better slow down. Heroic deeds — and the ups and downs that follow them — will now mean much more. “You need to know yourself well enough to decide whether you can sacrifice yourself for the team,” says Loftesness. “The desire to make life easier for their colleagues is noble, but not rational in the long run, if this is the only reason you want to improve.”

Become a manager if your growth depends on the growth of other employees. “Once in the summer, two of our developers became managers. At this time, new interns came to us. The first manager constantly complained that an intern was attached to him and this takes a lot of his time. The second saw this as an opportunity to teach a young developer something new, ”says Loftesness. “Managers can also love the technical part of their work, but they will feel full satisfaction when they help others develop.”

Become a manager if you can show sympathy. This is one of the main qualities of a good leader. “Not everyone has the ability to empathize, but I know one way to check for its presence. I ask the staff to talk about the conflict that occurred at work. Then I ask them to describe what was happening at that moment in the head of another person, ”says Loftesness. “If they can explain why the other person wanted them to take a certain action, this is a sign of empathy, as well as a sign of a good manager.”

Become a manager if you can show the trust you expect from others. Perhaps the most important advice: do not lie. Do not tell your subordinates important news "in secret." There is another effective way to establish - not only maintain - a trusting relationship. “A good leader is like a good interviewer,” says Loftesness. - The best interviewers do what they themselves expect from their interlocutor.

They tell stories from their lives, share funny stories and get the same in return. Obviously, they do not try to control the whole process of discussion: they usually give little, but receive much in return. I think the same with managers. When you ask questions and show that you are not indifferent to the interlocutor, you get the opportunity to share emotions and cause confidence. ”

If you see that your colleague is having difficulty in work, and one of the first to approach him to offer his help, then this is a good sign.

Get ready to say goodbye to programming. When you start managing other developers, programming and solving technical issues are no longer your direct responsibility. Most of the latter-day managers are not ready for this, and it is not easy for them to get used to it.

“It may take some time to adapt, and the sooner you adapt, the faster you will become a competent leader,” said Loftesness. “Of course, everything depends on the current situation in the company, but given the amount of material that needs to be learned, it seems to me that future managers should be prepared not to program for a year.”

Judge for yourself: most developers spend four years at the university to learn the basics of programming and get a job. Wouldn't it be wiser to devote some of this time to management skills? It is up to you whether you can do without programming for a year.

It is worth noting that when Lofthesness says that you need to rest from the code, he means writing it. “It’s much more important for a manager to be able to read the code than to write it. Each manager has a desire to write the code himself, and this distracts him from his main job, ”says Loftesness. - You need to read a lot of code to know what your subordinates are doing and at what stage they are, and after that - to take appropriate measures. Just resist the temptation and do not write the code yourself just to get away from the duties of a manager. ”

Loftesness saw many managers experiencing difficulties during such a transition. “We had one developer who knew that he would be promoted, but had no idea what he would do. As a result, the management turned out to be a more severe test for him than he expected. He watched me and other managers. He knew that managers were inundated with a large volume of letters, meetings and non-computer work. ” But he did not think about how hard it would be for him without programming, so that, in the end, he remained an ordinary employee.

As in any new business, the most important tasks that you face at the moment will always cause discomfort. And that's fine.

“Immediately after the upgrade, I didn’t stop programming because I was used to it, and so we coped with our tasks faster. But I had to regret this, ”says Loftesness. - I did not tell my boss that we are behind schedule, and did not give a critical assessment of one of the members of my team. If I paid more attention to the result of the work of my subordinates, I would have fired someone who could not cope with his duties much earlier. This would ultimately benefit both the developer, and the project, and the team as a whole. I had to stop programming much earlier. ”

“We need to be able to see the difference between an assistant and an anchor,” he says. The new manager acts as an “assistant” if he does everything to ensure that his players better and faster cope with their work. However, he becomes an “anchor” for the whole team if he tries to do all the work himself, without giving others room for development.

“Trust, but verify,” says Loftesness. - No need to keep track of how your employees write code. However, it is worth paying attention to the important points and giving positive or negative comments about the successes or failures in their work. ” In addition, from time to time, give them the freedom to implement their own ideas, even if you do not agree with them yet. This is the best way to demonstrate your trust.

“Try to look for moments when the future manager wants to try something new. Of course, if the current task is important, and its failure to disrupt the entire project, it will not be the right moment. But there are situations when an employee wants to make X, and you think it is better to do Y. Explain to him why you think so. Allowing an employee to do X, regardless of whether he succeeds in it or not, you inspire him to trust in yourself. ”

Get ready for active interaction with your team. After Loftesness became the director of the Twitter development department, he quickly realized that not programming, but communication with people would lead him to success. “I took over the management of a serious project, launched by our vice president of technology issues. My boss had too much work, and he asked me to take on this project. His only goal was product launch. ”

Lofthesness immediately needed three more developers to launch the product as quickly as possible. One of them turned out to be rather observant and began to ask Loftesness about the details of the project and its main goals. “At that time it was the main project in our company. He was supposed to save Twitter, and no one doubted that, ”Loftesness recalls. “But after this developer asked me some serious questions, we realized that we had created an inappropriate product and closed this project.” In the end, we decided to go the other way, but it was a turning point for our team and for the leadership of Twitter. "

The decision to become a manager means that instead of working directly on a product, you will now constantly look for opportunities to communicate, to better understand what your subordinates are doing and to maximize the effectiveness of their work. Here are two non-obvious ways that Loftesness uses to improve interaction with its team:

Continuous communication about future plans. “Perhaps this will not happen at your first meeting, but I think that very soon you will need to know what your employees are striving for? What are their goals for future work, if they have any? Usually they say: "I just want to be a developer."

However, they may think about something more specific, for example: “In a couple of years I want to become a manager,” or “I want to run my startup someday, so I need to learn everything that can help me with this,” or “ I want to be a recognized technical expert. ” Anyway, it is very important to ask these questions and regularly communicate with employees on this topic. ”

Making a list of consecutive actions. “Every week on Monday morning I meet with my boss, in the afternoon I have a meeting with my team, and, starting on Tuesday, we have a separate conversation with each employee. Thanks to this sequence of actions, information is transmitted down from the very top, so developers are always aware of all cases. Otherwise, I slow down the whole process, and the information is lost on me or on someone else. With such inconsistent interaction, the manager can easily miss something. ”

As you can see, even before taking office as a manager, you need to think a lot, prepare well and develop a detailed plan. The sooner you do all this and decide how you will achieve your goals, the better you will be prepared for further work. If you have not changed your mind to become a leader, this is what you have to do next.

Days 1-30: Self-education


If you decide to become a manager, then you will have to spend the first month on self-study. To this end, Lofthesness offers several ways:

Allocate a separate time for self-study. There is no easier and more effective way to gain knowledge about management than to allocate time for this in your schedule. This will be extra time, not counting meetings with new employees and individual conversations where you will put your knowledge into practice. “Seriously, open the calendar and set aside a separate time for yourself,” says Loftesness. - At this time, you will do everything to become the best manager, whether it is a meeting with a mentor or reading literature on management techniques. "

The following are the materials that Loftesness recommends reading to each manager:


In addition, there are many good writers who briefly outline certain management principles. Among them, Joel Spolsky , Rends (nick Michael Lopp) and Bob Sutton are notable . You should not take all their judgments for the truth: use them to form your idea of ​​how best to manage a team.

Do not hide that you are engaged in self-development. Young leaders quickly learn from their team, but they also use other techniques. “When you set aside time for self-education, you shouldn’t hide it,” says Loftesness. - Your team should see your schedule. Many managers are not allowed to look in their calendar, and this can confuse or alert the team. Your employees will appreciate your efforts before they even benefit from them. Allocate time in your calendar and just title it, for example: “Improving manager skills”.

Find a manager who will become your mentor (or two, or three). Nearly half of the managers surveyed by Loftesness have never asked for advice from a mentor with management experience. This is a missed opportunity. “In the first month, ask your boss to advise you a good mentor. But don't ask him to be a mentor himself, ”Loftesness says. - You should already receive the necessary recommendations from your boss. Find someone who works at least partly in a different direction: he will be able to give you additional advice or advice. ”

You will be surprised at how many managers appreciate your request. “The directors on Twitter and Amazon are almost always willing to make time to help novice executives,” says Loftesness. - If you cannot ask someone personally, write to the management about your request. The question should be extremely simple: “I need someone who could take the time and answer a few questions about management. Is anyone free now? ”

Days 31-60: Search Your Rhythm


For the second month, your goal will be to create a schedule that will help you find your rhythm: it will be very different from the rhythm in which you worked, being a programmer. Here are some tips from Loftesness and many of the other managers he interviewed:

Cancel the meeting. Paradoxically, but the most common mistake of managers is the constant participation in meetings. “It seems to me that canceling meetings at the right time and often doing so is a good habit,” said Loftesness. - Sure, you need to respect the efforts of others, but always try to value your time.

You will be invited to a meeting because other managers are present or many people are participating in them. At first, you may feel obliged to visit it. Personally, I ask our managers to ask themselves: “Will this meeting help me accomplish my current task?”

As for the time of your developers, it is important to respect and value their opinion. “Once I worked with a man who liked to complain about my subordinates. He once asked me: “Did you know that Susan was not in the last three meetings? Can you talk to her about this? ”I explained to him that Susan was able to make decisions herself, and if he thought that she needed to attend the meeting, he should convince her that this was important.”

Treasure your time, but not to the detriment of others. For these 30 days, you have scheduled regular meetings with your team, and also allocated time to improve their managerial skills. Continue to value your time, but not at the expense of the time of your developers. “If we need to meet with the developer, I try to allocate time at the beginning and at the end of the working day so as not to distract him from work,” says Loftesness. “One hour at the beginning of the working day costs much less than 30 minutes in the middle.”

Create for yourself a "cycle of events." The event cycle is a special list that the manager must periodically look at - every day, week, and month. “The goal of compiling it is to make sure that you set aside time for important things that you may accidentally forget,” says Loftesness. - It is more difficult to train yourself to look into it every week and month, as this happens less often. It’s important that you get in the habit. ” The following is an example of a manager's event cycle:


Manager's Event Cycle - David Lofthesness

To work effectively with the event cycle, you need to allocate time in your schedule in order to review and respond to each set of questions within the established time frame. If you need to change the schedule or postpone viewing the event cycle, do not worry: at least you will make an informed choice, giving you the opportunity to change priorities, if necessary.

In some cases, do not delay the solution to the problem. “Daily event cycles can play an important role during the recruitment of new employees. At such moments, the main thing is to take in a staff of a suitable candidate, says Loftesness. - At the same time, you can decide to postpone sending the letter to the candidate until the end of the next meeting. But if you set aside time for this, you will definitely return to this task. ”

Days 61-90: Introspection: Do You Need It?


In the last month of your 90-day plan, you must assess your potential manager. You have two tasks. Firstly, considering your results, you should clearly present your strengths, as well as the direction in which you are going to work further. Secondly, you must have concrete facts of what you can and want to become a manager. Here are a few questions that Loftesness proposes to answer to their managers so that they evaluate their capabilities:

What are the benefits of each of your team members and how are you going to use them? Loftesness found out about this question from Marcus Buckingham , the author of The Only Thing You Should Know . This question allows you to assess the manager’s knowledge of the obvious merits of each member of his team. Try for a minute to list all the strengths of their employees. Moreover, you must clearly understand how you will use the strengths of your players to achieve the goals of the team and advance each of them up the career ladder.

“One of our developers was not serious about writing code. He quickly developed the program and began to work with it. Later, I understood why, ”says Loftesness. - He was a master of debugging programs. He tried to implement something faster, and then start looking for mistakes. ”

The lack of interest of this programmer to improve his development skills negatively influenced the team and the final product, but his unique abilities helped him to succeed. Especially for him, Loftesness singled out a special role: he had to deal with bugs during the whole working day.

However, there are more difficult situations. Developers can show unique abilities that benefit the team, but do not contribute to their professional growth. “One manager named Glen did an excellent job. “He knew his strengths and clearly presented his perspectives,” says Loftesness. - He was distinguished by the ability to determine the main task of the team and act quickly. Once he made a plan of his expectations from the analysis of the code by the team, and almost immediately the performance of the whole team grew noticeably.

Glen was greatly appreciated in the team, but he decided to become an ordinary developer again. He felt that he liked working with the code more than with people, although he did an excellent job with both. Loftesness was also more important so that Glen would not lose his motivation and stay in the company than leave her upset.

If after 90 days you can’t tell you what is special about each of the employees in your team, it means that you didn’t communicate with them or ask the wrong questions.

Think about what you lacked to achieve your goal: skills, time or motivation. If you do not have enough skills or time, try to fix it. If you do not have enough motivation, then this is no less important discovery for you: perhaps you are not suitable for this position.

Does the team bring the desired result from it? If the first question concerned individual employees, here we are talking about their interaction in a team. Here are some specific questions that need to be answered to evaluate the result of their work:


After 90 days, the manager must be able to identify areas that need improvement. If the problem cannot be solved immediately, the team must understand where to start. Otherwise, maybe someone is playing the wrong role in the team.

Without a doubt, the team’s results are central to the company as a whole, but it’s also important for the manager to understand how they were achieved. “Learn all that relates to the implementation of the plan. If members of your team do not have time to meet the deadlines, maybe at a certain stage you overload them with work, because you overestimate their abilities? When exactly does the team fail to deliver the job on time and why? Says Loftesness. “What is more important is not how far you will go, but how your engine works.”

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/294222/

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