Three Most Important Rules for Managing Your Dev Team

Ever had problems with your software development team? I mean not only an outsourcing team, but also with your in-house dev team. We sure had, and I bet you had too. Read on.

We’ve been managing dev teams (in-house and remote) for over four years and learned something during this process. Especially when you have not just one team, but many. The #1 problem is communication, even if you speak the same language and go to the same office every day. Let’s dig it up and set up three rules which will keep your dev team in shape and you up to date no matter what.

Trust — OR — the question in your mind, “Do they really work during the day?”

Implement daily written reports.

It’s easy. Simply ask your developers to send you daily written reports. BaseCamp / Trello / Jira and other project management tools are great, but don’t solve this issue. It can still be a mess and you may need to check multiple things to understand what happened that day.

It’s especially valuable when your dev team is working on a long-term task. A simple 2–4 line written email report solves this perfectly, whether you have a remote or in-house dev team. Imagine, it’s near the end of the workday, and you start getting these short reports in your email inbox, something like:

- “Hi Jake,
Today I was helping John with the notification features update, and also working on implementing the Twillio API. I’m almost finished. I’ll probably spend 2h more tomorrow.
Jim”

That’s easy. You get these reports from all your dev team members, so you can sleep well. If there are any issues, you’ll see that in the reports, too.

2. “I’ll finish it first and will send an update then” — when your developers keep quiet until they fix the issue/release a new feature.

Set the schedule.

Imagine if one of your team members decided to finish the feature and only then update you. You wouldn’t know until the next morning that he/she had been working on something unnecessary the whole night and only sent you a report at 5am, and also that he/she didn’t go to the office till 3pm.

That’s where you should apply another rule — no matter how long your dev team plans to stay at work at night, they should send reports by a certain time. For example, they should send their report by 7pm, no matter what. This way you will know in advance that some of your team members plan to stay late and work on something you really don’t need right now, and you can respond with proper instructions.

Report

- “Hi Jake,
I was working on the integration the whole day. I plan to stay till 2am, I want to finish it.
Jim”

Your reply

- “Hey Jim,
Appreciate your desire to get s**t done, but I really need your help tomorrow at 9am on a call with one of our clients’ tech team. So, let’s finish the integration tomorrow. See you!
Jake”

3. “Still working on that stuff…” — when you keep getting the same updates and it feels like nothing is moving forward.

Implement semi-deadlines for navigation.

You know those long-term updates or product releases, when it could take 1–2 weeks to roll things out and you keep getting the same updates:

- “Hi Jake, everything is great. I’m still working on this new feature.”

Then at the end, you learn that something actually went in the wrong direction.
To avoid that, set additional deadlines — at least one. Somewhere in the middle of the project. So your team members can simply add a deadline update to a report:

“Hi Jake,
Everything is great. I’m still working on this new feature. And yeah, we’re on target for the first checkpoint. Everything will be ready by Thanksgiving, as we planned.
Jim”

Just by using these three rules, you will increase your dev team productivity dramatically. We’ve done it for ourselves. Stay tuned and we’ll share much more interesting stuff down the road. If you need any help with the software development, check our platform — DevTeam.Space

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