You Don't Need a Development Manager

Published 13 November 07 by Justin French, 1 comments

Some interesting things have happened at RedBubble over the last year (already?). One that’s been at the forefront of my thinking over the last few weeks is how we don’t seem to need a Development Manager at all.

We had one. It wasn’t me, but I’ve been there before. It was the typical role, with the usual stuff:

• know the system, be sure it works
• lead the team & make sure things get done
• make sure “the business” doesn’t hassle “the developers” with crazy ideas and scope creep
• make sure the dev team is happy and productive
• manage the project timeline and backlog
• estimate and plan out the dev team’s time
• argue over deadlines
• translate requirements into tasks and stories that can be implemented
• manage expectations

Adopting a more agile development process (Scrum, or something like it, if you’re interested) certainly removed a lot of the crap from this role and pushed things in the right direction, but it still didn’t work out.

Really, this is far too much work for one person to do well, so what’s the point? The role stinks of big business, it gets in the way of actually doing stuff, it frustrates the shit out of everyone and it’s absolutely destined to fail in a start-up environment.

None of this is the manager’s fault, by the way.

What do we do instead? As a team, we manage the team. We have smart people with a complimentary and multidisciplinary skill set, so we farm out different parts of the role amongst ourselves.

Pete (the boss) took on all the human resources stuff and assumed. I took on a lot of the iteration planning & day-to-day leadership. John and Dave took on the systems architecture. Grant , Kath and Xavier all pushed in new directions to pick up the slack. The entire team helps with bugs, planning and estimation. We basically self-organise and keep each other in line.

No-one stands between the person who needs stuff done and the person who can do it, no one holds everything in their head, no one plays the role of the gatekeeper and no one has the impressive title on their business card.

We’re getting things done faster this way, no doubt, and that’s incredibly important for a start-up.

However, this huge pay-off would not be possible without some boundaries and an open, honest dialogue — we know how much work we can do in an average week, so we’re not asked to commit to anything unrealistic, and we’re quite comfortable telling Pete that he’s asking us to build something far too vague, or that his cheeky 1 hour “simple text changes” card was incredibly optimistic.

There’s an overhead to this of course. The time we spend managing ourselves is time we don’t spend writing code or pushing pixels around, but I’m convinced we’re still way in front.

If you’re looking to hire a manager, I can highly recommend sniffing around inside your own team first. Or if your manager is overloaded (they all are, right?) don’t tell them to suck it up — ask them what they can offload to others in the team to free up some time.