How I Failed Managing The Engineering Team

And lessons learned on stepping up as manager from individual contributor

It is always a dilemma of whether to stay as an active coder or being a manager. I still love to code, but I somehow always get trusted to be the one who manages the team.

Last year at my previous work (a mature 100+ years company), I obliged to lead a project to replace my two predecessors (yes, it was two persons before): one got promoted and another got assigned to another city.

Quick status on the project: this is the first time we work together with the third-party vendor to build the app, the first try to implement scrum, with a total of around 20+ people working on the project.

With no one have ever experienced a scrum model, this project becomes quite a catastrophe. Almost never achieve the target set every two weeks, a daily standup that’s not sophisticated, I don’t know how to detail the task, and so on.

Moving to Kitabisa.com as a startup, it is the first time I experience how a scrum runs properly. Sprint grooming, sprint planning, set the story point, do the daily standup, and a retrospective on the last day of the sprint. I learn what went wrong on my previous project, and if I can go back in time I know what’s need to be done.

In a couple of months, I was trusted to lead the payment squad with a total of only 4 people. 2 were on probation and my challenge to them is completed well. But I fail to catch a problem that happened to the one left. She resigned with feeling that her existence was not important, and seems like as a woman her voice was being ignored. Whether it was true or not, I fail to catch the problem even it is not related directly to the work.

Manage the core squad 3 months later is quite easy as the team is mature enough. Everyone knows what they’re doing and each one has high self-awareness. Most of the time I still can do coding.

A big challenge comes when I need to lead the backend from 3 different squads at the same time, while also still manage the core team. This is also the first time joining a full product team (before it’s just building the API or work with infra). So I need to know the whole why a feature must build, what’s the requirement, how it works on the web and mobile app, working closely with frontend and mobile teams.

Having a good experience before with a team that has high self-awareness, I’m being less worry and just relax. I almost try to left it to the team without doing much with the hope everything can be done as expected. Sadly, is not. Even I have some senior engineer level on the team, the team still needs to be monitored and managed well. I do even lose the timelines of the target with the squads as it is too much to handle while I still trying to code.

With multiple experiences I have in managing the team, these are the lessons learned:

• It’s hard handling a big team, like consist of more than 15 or 20 people. When you have it, you need to separate it into different groups and choose a leader for each group.
• You need to learn how you will run the team, what framework will you use. And make sure your team also knows about it.
• As a manager, you will also be a mentor to the team. Do not ever skip the one on one session at least once a month or two.
• Each team is different. Well, you can still learn the experience of any team. However, sometimes you can’t do the same way for those.

Originally published at https://ardityawahyu.github.io.