Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Author: Pawel Brodzinski

  • Money as a Motivator

    OK, the subject will be controversial. Money as a motivator. If you ask people what motivates them to work, they’d throw a bunch of different things much more often than they’d say about remuneration. Self-development options are evergreen here, but good atmosphere, top technologies, interesting products or well-organized processes are all mentioned more often than pure cash. By the way that’s one of my interview questions and, believe me, I hear “money” much, much less than I’d expect. Rob Walling presents quite a long list of different qualities which are valued more than money by developers. That’s first perspective.

    Another one is pointing money actually does no good in the area of motivating people. David Carr in his post about money as a motivator shows a list of examples where money doesn’t really affect positively people’s work or even harm their attitude and, as a result, effectiveness. That’s other perspective.

    Personally I strongly believe in non-monetary motivating techniques. “CEO’s handshake” followed by several words of praise can have much more impact than a payload of money. That’s another perspective.

    Having said all of that, ask people if they’re willing to change the job for a better one in almost every aspect they can imagine. Better atmosphere, cooler technology, more interesting products and wide range of possibilities to self-develop. The only worse thing would be money. Few would follow. And if you leave aside those who are starting their own businesses you end up almost empty-handed.

    Now, do another test – situation is the same but in the second job money is better, but e.g. atmosphere is worse. More candidates? What a surprise. Oh, is that really such a big surprise?

    OK, where’s my point then? There are a few of them actually:

    • Money alone doesn’t work very well when you want to add motivation over the standard effort.

    • Money is very often used wrong. If it is so the result are usually opposite than intended.

    • When used well, which is rather rare by the way, money can work as a motivator.

    • Non-monetary motivation techniques are essential but they don’t substitute remuneration – they supplement money.

    • Money is more important for people than they’d be willing to admit.

  • Role of the First Job

    It’s been told a lot about managing your career. How to plan the career, how to get position you’d be happy with, how to push your way through the recruitment process, etc. You can find a lot of reading about the subject (personally I think Rowan Manahan has nice insights in that area), but I think we usually miss one thing here. We kick-off our careers and define our starting point usually quite unconsciously, when we start the first (longer) job. Of course the kick-off doesn’t limit our potential, but usually defines how painful it will be to achieve the final goal.

    The environment which gives you first professional lessons forms you as an employee. And I don’t mean company culture only – one thing is how the organization as a whole is set up but another, even more important, how your team looks like and what kind of persons are leaders. Well-managed, integrated, team with influential leader is a great kick-off to your career. And it really doesn’t matter what programming language you use or what kind of projects you work on. The most important things you learn aren’t technology specific – team work or accountability can be learnt anywhere, customer/user-centric mindset isn’t the thing which is exclusively available in IT only. And a new programming language or project management technique? You’ll learn it when you need it.

    When I think about my career I always come back to my very first team, where I learnt all those basics. I always considered the first professional environment as important but still when I’ve made a little analysis some time ago and results have surprised me a lot. I’ve taken people from my CDN XL team, where I’d grown up and listed what they’re doing now.

    • Our director now co-owns a company
    • Three of team manager owns or co-owns a company
    • One more is a VP
    • Three developers got director ranks
    • One more is a team manager now
    • Three consultants owns or co-owns a company
    • Another three of them are directors now
    • Three more became team managers
    • Four testers moved to more prestigious developer role
    • Two of them got their teams to manage

    Wow. I mean, really, wow. I’ve just counted about two third of the team back then, and it was just a few years ago. What more, I can think about almost no one who wouldn’t appreciate the role of being there when looking from the perspective of their careers. For majority of us that was the first job, for another group that was first job they stuck with for a longer time. Definitely most of us set up our professional standards during that time. I believe the team, the way it was organized and managed and the atmosphere were very important elements of mixture which brought us wherever we are today.

  • Eliminator Questions during Job Interview

    Two sources made me thinking about recruitment process once again. One was Rowan Manahan with his post about eliminator questions. Another was a series of interviews with potential summer interns I had last days.

    Rowan lists several questions which, if answered badly, can ruin your chances for a hire. On his personal list you can find:

    • Telling about your career

    • Telling something negative about you

    • Giving reason why you should be hired

    • Questions you ask

    I asked myself if I can make a similar list in my case. I followed my last interviews with potential interns and I can’t make similar blacklist as Rowan. I can’t think about any single question which answered poorly can ruin chances of the interviewee. On the other hand, it’s possible to ruin the chances giving really poor answer for any of questions.

    There’s another area where I can’t consider myself as a typical interviewer, described by Rowan, as I usually start with a positive (not neutral) attitude to the candidate. When I recall my last recruitment meetings I try to enter the room with a slight will to hire the person. This helps me to create friendly atmosphere and (I hope) moves some pressure out of the candidate.

    I think that’s fair. You have never a chance to make the first impression for the second time and interviewees are stressed, they want it or not, when they meet you at the very first meeting. And no, I don’t have a problem with overrating people. With some experience in that field you’ll easily recognize all yellow or red lights which appear – you don’t need eliminator questions here. I rather try to be sensitive on specific phrases which can be heard all over the conversation which can be translated into “Don’t hire me.”

    I’m curious if you have your eliminator questions and, if yes, what can be found there.

  • Long Career as a Developer

    Software development is a specific role. Acceptable quality is on much lower level than in different areas of our lives. The product is more virtual. New technologies are invited much faster. And people stick to the role for shorter period of time.

    The last thing isn’t typical for all positions in software business. For example there are many long-serving project mangers. By the way that makes much sense, because one of essentials for PM is experience. Although for developers experience is also one of key factors, which decide about quality of their work, long careers on that position are much less often. In the long run developers struggle to outgrow their role and escape to architecture, project management or running own business.

    While I don’t judge that attitude (I used to have the same back than when I was a developer) I think we’ll see more and more positions requiring 10+ years of experience in software development roles. On one hand complexity of systems increases, on the other software goes deeper and deeper into our lives. It’s hard to imagine a hospital without any software working somewhere inside. It’s hard to imagine a new car without at least a couple of processors. It’s hard to imagine a jet without all those cool-looking systems, powered by (what a surprise) thousands lines of code. And it’s so easy to imagine losing life in any of above places. Over the years it’s more and more about the software, its quality, performance, availability and reliability. And developers.

    Developers who make everyday code-level decisions basing on their best knowledge and experience. The more different solution they’ve co-created, the easier is to make the right choice. The fewer mistakes they’ve already made, the bigger is the chance to choose the wrong path. Sure, the team doesn’t have to be built from experienced developers only – it would be neither wise nor cost-effective choice – but leaving young wolves without experienced leader doesn’t guarantee you a success.

    Yes, I hear you talking about Bill Gates or Larry and Sergey, but they were wunderkinds. You don’t see many of those around and most likely you won’t find any in your team. If I was asked who would lead the new complex project when high availability, high performance and high reliability were on the top of the requirements list I’d look for an experienced developer. Someone who has already dealt with performance issues and optimized the code, not the one who doesn’t even know where the performance traps are. Someone who has already designed a couple of poor architectures, not the one who is yet to make those mistakes. Someone who has tried different technologies, not the one who is all hot about the coolest Ruby-on-Rails only. I’d look for that particular type which isn’t very popular among developers.

    That’s why I believe there is high demand on people who stick with development role for a longer period of time and it will grow over time. There will be more and more complex systems to be developed. Definitely that’s an idea to consider if you’re a developer and you’re planning your career.

  • Team Management: Find Your Way

    As you probably know, my view on management is rather classic – nothing very far from whatever you can find in a respected canon. I’m against micromanagement, but I try to care about details which are important for people. I try hard to be honest with the team and praise them when they deserved. I believe good performance reviews are important. Just old-school, boring management techniques.

    I believe that’s the way the whole management thing should be done. However it fascinates me every time I read about Bill Gates’ style of management or One Google Management Way.

    Bill, the builder of the greatest company in nineties was considered as bully and the one above isn’t the only example. OK, you can find a lot of bullies in high management around, but somehow many people in Microsoft saw in there a way to improve people’s performance. Everyone had to be superbly prepared, ready to discuss every detail of their opinions and able to resist pressure. Bill’s charisma was essential in building company’s power and his attitude was an integral part of it. You can say it’s weird and it doesn’t work anywhere else, but with Microsoft results speak for themselves.

    When you take current decade and look for its symbol you probably see Google. And you see another strange approach to management. More than 50 people in teams, when 7 people are considered as the optimal group to manage. Famous 20% of time for pet projects. Extremely tough recruitment process with more than 7 meetings on average before hiring. Engineers as sacred cows. All of those, and many more, combined in one place create unique management culture, which is against anything you could learn during an MBA course. And it builds the success of the company.

    I’m impressed. But I’m not going to follow. There are of course some ideas I’d like to implement but, in both scenarios, model as a whole isn’t copyable. As Tom Evslin writes, a barely-graduated hire won’t be as smart as Bill Gates only when he’s as rude. Typical organization won’t achieve a stunning success only when they spend one day in a week for employees’ pet projects.

    I think that organizing a company in a way which allows people to like (just like, nothing more) their employer is tough enough to doom the management to failure in vast majority of cases.

  • Good Enough

    My friend asked me to give an opinion about design of application his company had developed. I took a glimpse on their technical presentation with a lot of screenshots. I must admit my attitude was very positive, whole thing looked professionally. That’s what I told my friend. His answer was a bit surprising as he said he would have worked more on UI design. On the beta stage? It was really good enough. Or even better enough.

    The discussion brought me to think about good enough paradigm in software business. One side believes that if software is good enough the job is done. Another wants to polish all the details until they bring their software into perfection. Although I haven’t seen any statistics about that I believe the former group is more numerous one.

    Software constantly conquers new areas of our life including those where there’s hardly place for good enough believers. Hospitals, planes, cars or military areas. I guess you wouldn’t be happy if your good enough software managing your car brakes crashed. Yet still most software which is developed is not mission-critical products. It just sends e-mails, creates documents, pass information, manage some content, store some data etc. There’s a choice between good enough and close to perfection.

    Personally, I’m a good enough guy. I have just one point here. Costs. Imagine a theoretical scale of perfection of software ranging from 0% to 100%. When you start your development you’re in 0% when you finish you’re somewhere in upper half of the scale. On the beginning improvements are easy. You invite first test UI which looks like it was designed by blind monkey. Then you have first iteration of target UI. It’s a huge improvement, probably a couple of dozens percents on the scale. However, when you’ve already made several iterations with UI and it looks decent the next would be probably making extensive usability testing. It’ll take much more effort than the first steps. Results will be probably much less significant. Few percent if you’re lucky. Next step? Maybe user feedback? You employ a number of people, who deal with all e-mails and phones from users, than trying to find a schema in all that mess, then verifying if accidentally some requests are not exactly opposite to others etc. More effort. More money. Results limited. Maybe another percent earned on the scale.

    The example says about UI, but the rule is general. First performance optimizations will be fast and effective, unless you do them randomly. After some successes they’ll become harder and more costly. On the beginning of stabilization you’ll deal with big numbers of issues vastly improving stability of software. On the end the whole deployment will wait for a single bug fix. Of course that’s not a paradigm – there’re exceptions. Sometimes you can find some easy improvements even when you’re high on the scale, but it shouldn’t happen very often.

    That’s why I’m a “good enough” believer. I don’t refuse to make small improvements, even when users can live without them. They’re welcome as far as they’re cheap. Great example was described by Basecamp team. Those changes are close to border separating good enough from better (hard to say on which side they are), but they were quick and cheap. And I guess the more important improvements were done earlier. If the changes were significantly more expensive I think 37signals would leave it as it was.

    I believe that unless you have much time and money to spend you shouldn’t chase the ideal. There’re more important things to do.

  • My Micromanagement Experience

    I’ve already written about micromanagement in general. Thing I haven’t yet shared is my own experience with learning how to live without micromanagement.

    When I started having any impact on my colleagues (I wasn’t their formal boss, it was just an informal leader role) I also got some responsibility for a part of development process – it was planning and running functional testing against an application. Because people I worked with were all newbies I decided (surprise, surprise) that I’ll do the most responsible part leaving “my” team the rest. It looked so natural. Hey, who’s the most experienced person here? Who’s the hero?

    There were only five of us, including me, so it worked well that way – the final release was hard earned, but despite 3-week slip I still consider it as a success. I earned my very own team then. It soon grew up as we took over also responsibility for support. And then the model collapsed. I could no longer take every important issue on me. I could no longer check everyone’s work. I could no longer say how to do every tiny detail of our work. More people – more managerish work and less time for the rest. Bigger responsibility – more important tasks to control.

    I was lucky to have quite a good team then with several persons which had already earned my trust, so my lesson didn’t have a big impact on our general performance, but with other people I wouldn’t be so sure if I’d be there, where I am now.

    Later on, my boss asked me who’d be my successor as a manager. I didn’t know, but I told him I’d come with some plan on that. I thought about that: “Hey, I’m the one who know the job – the team is only executor of my will. How they’d know what to do without me?” The Red Light of Micromanagement would blink then if there were any. This was another lesson to learn – the team has to do all the tasks, even most important ones (maybe except of some managerial crappy things no one wants to deal with). “What-ifs” came to support the lesson. What if I went to holidays and something serious would happen? What if a car hit me? What if I changed the job? Oh, wrong example, who’d care than? What if I was promoted than? The answer was always: it would be a problem.

    I found a couple of people and delegate (what a nice word) important tasks to them. Not every single case was delegated, but at least every type of task. I found my successor too. And when I was promoted half a year later, my leaving was totally smooth.

    There’s another lesson I still learn. I work with project managers these days and I’m often tempted to say: do this and that. Act like this. Send the darn e-mail to the darn subcontractor with the darn escalation of the darn issue. To be honest I don’t always restrain the temptation (in other case it wouldn’t be the lesson I still learn). With experienced PMs it’s easier because I know they’ll discuss it with me if they have another idea. It’s harder with those who are still learning the job. I keep reminding myself, like a mantra: “let them decide, let them decide, let them decide, let them…” I know they’ll screw some tasks. However, that way their learning curve will be narrower and they’ll progress to a level when they’ll be tough partners in discussion. Especially when I’ll try to micromanage.

    I think the last thing is the most important one – let people learn. Even when you know they’ll fall, don’t take them through the obstacles on your own back. Let them fall and give them a hand then. Most of people learn on their own mistakes, only some very smart ones learn on others’ mistakes. I prefer to have first two project done with some issues and another ten done well (without my help) than to have first to project done well and another ten facing serious issues, because I can no longer make decisions and PM hasn’t had a chance to learn how to do it himself.

  • Micromanagement

    Today, I’ll write something so obvious that I’m almost ashamed of it. I thought if there’s anybody who doesn’t know that, but I still see lots and lots of people who act like they should read below advices. There’s a second reason also – it’s always worth to remind to myself these points.

    Micromanagement, that’s what I want to write about today. Why is it bad? There’s a bunch of reasons:

    • Manager can’t do everyone’s work. He has in the team 5, 10 or maybe 50 people, so in every case they do more than a single person could. Even if he’s a superhero. Even if there’s only one person in the team. Remember the manager has his own work. Oh, at last he should have some.

    • Manager’s competence doesn’t cover all competence in her team. She usually isn’t the best developer, the best tester, the best project manager. She has the best managerial attributes. Oh, at last she should have some. That’s why she’s the boss. I hope that’s the reason, in other case I offer my condolences to you.

    • Telling people how exactly they should do their tasks is usually stupid because they usually know better. They are closer to issues, closer to code/functionality/project plan/whatever and they work on that every single day (not only during micromanagement day of the week). Manager is like a driver – he can say if the car looks nice and drives fast. His team is like mechanics – they know what exactly happens in the engine. You’d rather ask the mechanic, not the driver how to fix brakes in you car, wouldn’t you?

    • In these several cases when the manager knows better what to do and how to do, telling people how exactly they should do their tasks is stupid, because people don’t learn accountability then. If the manager taught them micromanaging, they won’t take initiative, won’t be creative and won’t look for improvements of their work. Why should they? That’s the manager who tells them exactly how to work. But remember, she doesn’t have the time to micromanage every single person on regular basis. Even if she’s a superhero.

    Yeah, stupid indeed. It’s obvious. Why to write about that? I’ll answer with a question: why so there’s still so much micromanaging?

    I think reasons are different. When I recall micromanagers I met they’re driven by different demons. There’re two I Know It Better demons – first when the manager really know better how to deal with a task or an issue and second when he thinks he knows. The latter is much more common. There’s Do What I Say demon, when it doesn’t really matters if the solution is right or wrong, it’s all about doing what the manager said just to support his ego. There’s You Don’t Know The Big Picture demon, when micromanaging is justified with lack of wide knowledge about whole situation within the team. Nothing easier but to share the knowledge. There’re of course others, but those are the most common.

    You should listen none of them. There’s always a better way to deal with the task or the issue than micromanaging. You can come with your idea in every situation but don’t treat yourself as unmistakable, because you’re not (I bet). Bring discussion and be open to change your mind if someone, especially someone who’ll actually do the work, comes with another idea. And tell people what to do, not how to do that.

  • My Biggest Mistakes

    Have you ever wondered what were your biggest mistakes in your professional career? Which things you should do another way or at least try to change? It’s usually easy to judge others, especially looking from a perspective of time. Hey, he shouldn’t have left the company then, because now he’d have been promoted at least twice. Easy to say, because it’s about him and you know exactly what happened during those two years after he left. Back then the decision probably didn’t look like a mistake.

    With the same schema we can judge our own decisions, however it’s much harder. First, for most of us it’s difficult to accept that we actually made a mistake. Second, it’s even more difficult to be unbiased when you consider yourself and your own actions. Nevertheless it’s worth a try.

    There’s one thing more – people usually tend to share with others their successes, not failures, so your own experience is even more precious – you have unlimited access to it. You won’t find a lot of “failure stories,” so I thought I’d share some of mine.

    Personal interactions

    When I was leading a support team I had a couple of conflicts with developers partially based on personal background. I thought that if I’m so dedicated and if I struggle to do my best everyone should too. It’s not so hard to imagine that it was rather naive point of view (we worked in a corporation then). Instead of letting other managers to resolve the problem with their people I was making my private tiny war. E.g. we did some performance tests to prove that one of developers didn’t make optimizations, just to show he’d ignored the task. Why didn’t I ask him if he had done that and spent much time for useless tests? Bah, don’t ask me now. You should have asked me then. I can recall several similar situations, all of them having source in my personal likes/dislikes and resulting in, let’s say, not optimal business decisions.

    Building a team

    I was once a department director, building a team and a product from a scratch. By the way it was a great job. I think my biggest mistake then was too slow promotions within the team. For me it’s very hard to promote someone unless I’m completely sure she’s the right person. However I should overcome my resistance instead of waiting too long before official promotion for a couple of the leaders. Not mentioning that I didn’t even thought about potential successors of any of the leaders. Subconsciously I tried to direct my people through the way I passed once: first informal role of leader with real manager controlling whole team and then eventually getting own team and formal managerial role. Unfortunately, I and one of my colleagues changed the job leaving over a dozen of people with no junior and middle management. The promotions were soon carried out, but with people rather unprepared to managerial role and little supervising it wasn’t a vast success. Some time was wasted too.

    Communication with sales

    As a manager of operations team (development, implementations, quality assurance and project management team) my biggest mistake was poor contact with several sales people. I know there’s always a conflict between sales and development, but I’m far from thinking that the technical side is the one which is infallible. Quite the contrary, I even wrote that in general it’s better to have a business person as a CEO and sometimes having a geek as a leader of a company isn’t a great idea. I know all of that, but still I haven’t managed to be on good terms with few sales. And by now I still don’t see how I could get it done right with those people. I’m not even sure if it was possible. Maybe more time has to pass and I’ll find out the answer then. Maybe our characters are too different and we hadn’t even a chance. Nevertheless, the fact remains, it’s my failure too.

    Choosing an idea

    I was working with my friend on a piece of software. Whole thing was intended as a micro-ISV idea, but none of us decided to leave everyday job. In this case our biggest mistake was choosing an application we worked on. It’s not about a market for the application – I still believe we had a chance. It’s about our attitude – we had little fun while working on the software we’d chosen and we reached the point where none of us was still motivating himself, not mentioning about motivating a partner. The software died unfinished. We’d chosen the application only because some of work (part of the code) was already done, so we thought it’ll take much less work to finish. Now I think we had about 5% of work completed, so the choice wasn’t a well-thought one.

    Depending on situation my mistakes were followed by different consequences – in the first situation results were negligible, in the last example whole initiative ended up as a failure. It’s just a bunch of examples, but I can think about a list of others based on both my experience and my observations. Generally, it’s not shame to err – making a mistake once is an occasion to learn, but making the same mistake twice becomes a stupidity.

  • How to Make Decision with a Team

    Short but very interesting discussion with Piotr followed my post about leading a team of developers. Piotr accurately pointed that a leader should listen to his team and the team should participate (more or less) in decision-making process. At least that’s true in most cases.

    Despite the last word belongs to the leader, the team should feel they’re important. They should feel their opinions matter. They should feel the leader wants to listen to them. To be honest, more important is what they feel, not what’s the truth. Even if the leader doesn’t really listen to the team he should try to create impression that he does. That’s better than nothing.

    When I was learning the MSF, one of sensible yet surprising principles was that there’s a team of peers and every decision should be made by achieving a consensus. That’s of course utopia, but if by any chance you’re able to proceed with a decision in this way, you should. Even if it’s easier just to force your opinion.

    How to make the decision with the team then?

    • Ask teammates about their ideas, not suggesting them yours. This can give you fresh look on the problem. You aren’t a smart Alec (oh, if you believe you are and you’re still reading – give up the rest). Someone from the team can have a better idea.
    • Encourage them to contribute. In many cases if you don’t directly invite your teammates to participate, they won’t find enough courage or will or whatsoever and they won’t even say a word.
    • Discuss all ideas with the team. You’ll sometimes find that people would have changed their mind after discussion. Even on their own ideas. That’s much better than telling him that their concepts are worthless. Even if they are.
    • During discussion drill down every idea until you feel you understand it. If something is ambiguous let it be explained. If explanation is ambiguous too – drill deeper. Force them to drill with you (that’s what my boss keep asking me to do and believe me – it does work).
    • Think about all possibilities and make the decision. Team of peers is nice idea, but unless the choice obvious or there’s countless amount of time to discuss, someone just has to make find the way out. You won’t guess who it could be…
    • Communicate the decision but give reasons for it. If there was another hot option that was turned down motivate it either. People should know what the motivation behind the choice was.

    Sounds easy? It is not.

    • Usually you don’t have enough time. Not enough for discussion. Not enough for thinking it over. Not enough for managing all risks.
    • Sometimes not every factor can be known by whole team. Especially when decision is rather organizational than technical. In this case you can have your team against you. Even if you’re the one who is right.
    • Sometimes you don’t have your own opinion and none of provided ideas is convincing enough. Choose one and act like you were convinced, then. Your team needs convinced leader.

    If it was easy the leader wouldn’t be needed.

    Feel free to add something to both lists (especially to the first one).