One of the key responsibilities of Director of Engineering or any sort of software manager is ensuring the continuity of business. It just so happens that no matter what you do your engineers will need to move around inside and outside the company. When people leave you are stuck with a piece of software that is not supported for bug fixes and escalated configuration questions.
As a manager your internal and external customers generally come to you for answers, but with a sizable portfolio of say 10-12 products even a reasonably technical manager can’t possibly maintain the products that lose the engineering ownership. More importantly when you are pulled into bug fixing you lose your ability to unblock and facilitate the team’s workflow.
Recently I decided to try forming “software pods”. Pods consist of two developers and a tester. This ensures that I have three people who know how the product works and two people who can fix bugs or deal with hot escalations.
There has been anothe…
As a manager your internal and external customers generally come to you for answers, but with a sizable portfolio of say 10-12 products even a reasonably technical manager can’t possibly maintain the products that lose the engineering ownership. More importantly when you are pulled into bug fixing you lose your ability to unblock and facilitate the team’s workflow.
Recently I decided to try forming “software pods”. Pods consist of two developers and a tester. This ensures that I have three people who know how the product works and two people who can fix bugs or deal with hot escalations.
There has been anothe…