My personal experience and lessons learned from over 20 years of managing developers, designers, product owners, testers, and all kinds of technical people. These are my personal opinions based on leading teams at Apple, DoubleClick, LimeWire, Spotify, and HuffPost.

1. People Management
A grizzled veteran's perspective

2. What is People Management?
● Creating a team identity
● Recruiting recruits
● Playing team psychologist
● Planning a team strategy
● Setting goals
● Defining a process
● Coaching a team
● Evaluating team members
● Winning and losing
● Managing in the face of reality

3. Winning and Losing
● If you win every game you are not really
challenging your team
● If you lose every game you might want to
make some changes
● Inside every win is a loss
● Inside every loss is a win
● Luck has a lot more to do with winning and
losing than anyone cares to admit
● Make sure your team knows the difference
between winning and losing

4. Evaluating Team Members
● Create a clear and simple criteria to
measure and rank your team
● Constantly measure and rank your team (in
your mind)
● Give feedback early and often
● Give feedback in a useful form
● Give feedback with a purpose
● Give feedback that is honest
If you help your team members to grow they will value you
more than you can imagine

5. Setting Goals
● Don't fool around with goals
● Set V.A.G.U.E. Objectives (not S.M.A.R.T.)
○ Vague: You don’t know exactly what to do. The team member has to
find out. You job is to point in the right direction not draw the line down
the road. The answer is off-road.
○ Assay-required: Don’t measure—experiment. It’s the only path to
reliable knowledge.
○ Guesstimatable: I don’t know if you can do it. I think you can but
there is some risk of failure. This keeps you from feeling dead inside.
○ Unparalleled: If goals should be realistic then nothing impossible
would get done: Landing on the Moon, electing black men president,
creating a popular phone without a keypad.
○ Eternal: Nothing is ever finished. Keep refining, iterating, upgrading…

6. Creating a Team Identity
● Who are we?
● What are we doing?
● Where are we doing it?
● When are we doing it?
● Why are we doing it?
● How are we doing it?
A team without a core identity has already failed.
A team with a poor identity is in danger of failing.
A team with a great identity turns failure into success.

7. Recruiting Recruits
● Hire people who are not looking for a "job"
● Hire people who can teach you something
● Hire people who can teach themselves
● Hire people who can teach others
There are 2 kinds of people in an organization
Dividers: They require lots of help and divide the productivity of
organization in half.
Multipliers: They don't require any help at all and multiple the productivity
of the org by 10.
Dividers love Multipliers, but Multipliers hate Dividers!

8. Playing Team Psychologist
"I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV."
● Humans are social, hierarchical, territorial,
and opportunistic animals
● Study human behavior the way naturalists
do
● Most interpersonal problems can be solved
by listening
● A manager's main job is not to be an enabler
● Humor is a manager's best friend

9. Planning a Team Strategy
● What game are we playing here?
● Which way is the goal?
● What are the rules?
● What is the other team doing?
● Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't
Know's on third!
● How much time do we have left?
● How do we tell the difference between
winning and losing?

10. Defining a Process
● These are the rules of the "game"
● In software development we have various
flavors of waterfall and agile.
● In manufacturing we have various flavors of
total quality management.
● In the Blues we have chord progressions
and 12 bars
● In management we have Sigma Six, MBOs,
and OKRs
● In the Army we have Discipline and Initiative
● Become a student of all of them!

11. Coaching a Team
● Go watch a Soccer game and see what real
coaches do
● Coaches are not the "stars" of the team
● Coaches don't direct every play
● Coaches do most of their work before and
after the game
● Coaches can be players but not team
captians
● Coaches are very involved emotionally
● Coaches eat, sleep, and travel with the team
● Coaches focus on fundimentals

12. Managing in the Face of Reality
● Work is not the most important thing in life
● Work can create unintended consequences
● Know HR policy and the law
● Know when to back off
● Know when to call for backup
● Know where the line between work and life
is
● Remember that your team members are
paid to work for you and might not really
think your dumb jokes are funny :)

13. Other Types of Management to
Master
● Meeting Management: Ensuring meetings
aren't a waste of time
● Time Management: Ensuring the highest
priorities get done (and only those priorities)
● Executive Management: Ensuring you have
a great relationship with your boss without
being a "yes man or woman"
● Managing Managers: Ensuring you empower
your managers and not managing through
them

14. Questions?
● There are no dumb questions
● You can manage anything by asking great
questions
● Socrates (at his best) asked questions and
did not give answers
● A good question is the best kind of coaching
● A good question is not a thinly veiled attack
by the questioner on the questionee