Development Manager - Management Routine

Management Wise

• Capacity /Staffing Plan
  • Input
    • product contact background
    • product project functional and non functional requirement, time schedule requirement
    • backlog overview and rough estimation
    • team's skillset matrix
  • Output
    • What are the roles or desciplines, number of engineer with different skills, time to get them onboard
• Hiring
  • Interview
    • Software engineer interview
      1. Good at algorithm, proficient in one or two program language, just to make things work
      2. Object oriented programming
      3. Tools and technique
    • Senior Software engineer 
      1. in addition to software enginner, this role will understand advanced techonogy like clean code, design patterns, test driven, debugging
      2. Fucntional Requirement analysis　
      3. System design
    • Software Architect 
    1. 1. Code review
       2. Non-Functional : logging, fault tolerance. resilient, setting alert
       3. System Optimization : all tiers
       4. Performance benchmarking and strategy
       5. Salesman ship
    • QA
    • Devops Enginneer
      1. Tool : Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes
      2. Script language : Powershell, Python
      3. OS: Linux, Windows
• Onboading new engineers
  • Aims to achieve their full potential  
  • Evaluating readiness of "tool, process, knowledge"
  • Goal seting - Walk thru the organization hierarchy, challeges we face, mission we are undertaking, expecation on specfic task so new engineer can have a clear target to work on 
  • Rapid ramp up on tools - Virtualization, Automation to setup the software development env and test machine, reducing average  setup time to 1 day
  • Ramp up on knowledge in product and technical - Consolidated wiki pages explaining core technology, architecute and product - 
  • Pair programming
  • Assign buddy 
  • Regular 1:1 to check with progress
• Performance Review: 
  • Criteria
    • Timely deliverable
    • Quality deliberable
    • Communication - quality of vocal / written report 
    • Innovation 
    • Leadership
  • Merit Increase
    • Industrial standard
    • Managerial buffer
  • High performer
    • Score system, to be promoted 
  • Low performer
    • Observation period with clear goals of improvement
  • Award system
    • Star award - Outstanding for period of time like half year
    • Dinner and Movie - to one time outstanding performance
• Culture 
  • Teach and learn - encournage tech and managerial seminars
  • Lunch and learn - monetary reward to the lecture
• Group capability growth; 
  • practice 
    • Promote Domain driven design, convert complex domain knowledge and flow into process model and domain concept that is easy to understand and consolidated among architect, developer and qa
    • Establish role of SDET (software development engineer in Test) to add quality layer to product development, active thru out the development life cycle, techincal, Find out the underlying risk and test it in exploratory test and performance test.
    • TDD
    • Agile pratice 
• Grow project managers / scrum master
  • Base on their descipline, reinforce the knowledge they lacking
  • Preparing matric to measure the project progress / quality status / improvment items 
• Staff growth
  • Capabililty,Gap analysis
  • Setting goals and challenges to individual
  • Training material selection - online training, 
  • Organize and encourage tech talks.
  • Mentor and Coaching
  • Delegation
  • Socratic style - chanllenges resolved without presenting the answere, asking questions to the people and get the resolution together
• Product improvement
• Report to Boss
  • Latest project status, risks and mitigation, team goals
  • Getting buyin for getting more resources
    • Describe what we are and what we trying to achieve, it must be align with BU's interest, 
    • Related to saving budget / creating more opporturnity / keep your organizaiton robust 
• Latest status 

Product Definition

• Competition Analysis
• MVP (Minimum viable product) 20/80 principle 80% of time using the 20% features
• 2 dimensional matrix,  1st  dimension is the scale of business value (high. Medium, Low), 2nd dimension is the scale of engineering effort 
• Product roadmap

Product Development

Set up the quality system

• Defect prevention / RCA during prev to release and post release
• Quality layers like
  • UT (dev)
  • INTEGRATION TEST(dev),
  • ACCEPTANCE TESTqa),
  • REGERSSION(qa),
  • PERF TEST(qa),
  • INFRA TEST(qa)  

Daily Routine

• Clarify issues for my team, layout the clear task charters for coming weeks and months
  • Working thru email and meetings to discuss with external parties like PO, for roadmap priority and clear up the technical debt
  • IT group to talk about the latency issue in communication tools
• Meeting with team individual or group to discuss the issues happen in development, deployment and production
  • Code review
  • Design review
  • Standup meeting
  • Retrospect / RCA meeting
  • Triage meeting

Stakeholder management

• Identify stakeholders, 
• Keep stakeholders in the loops in the decision making, Involve them in the thinking process so they wont find unexpecte results
• Define clearly the plan what is out of scope.
• Setup the proper process, especially the change management process to prevent the scope creep.

Case study for crisis management:

Just inherited a buggy system and facing a angry customer received a big customer complaint from CTO,  my belief is no software is totally failure in quality unless we dont triage issue and categorize the issue properly. 80/20 rules also apply

1. show systematic approach and come up with action plan and milestone

2. show commiitment include having staffs to work extratime overtime to have work done