Software and project management consultant Murray Cantor discusses how to be a good manager and how to build a competitive software team. The text is intended to be accessible to managers with little software background as well as those with extensive experience. A sampling of topics includes software architecture, developing products, improving the efficiency of the organization, the Rational Unified Process, and team leadership. c. Book News Inc.

Are you an architect? Scrum Master? team leader? project manager? If you are any of these, you will find that leadership, done right, is a very tough job. This book deals with the hard parts. Not with tools, but with people. Here is the manifesto that drives this book: For us as team leaders, the goal and the way we measure our work is the overall growth in skills of self-organization and self-maintenance in each member of our team and the team as a whole. To that end: We accept that the team's needs from us change continuously based on their skills for handling the current reality of work, so we embrace a continuously changing leadership style over a one-style-fits-all leadership approach. We believe in challenging ourselves and our teams to always get better, so: * We create slack time for the team to learn and be challenged. * We embrace taking risks for our team over staying safe. * We embrace fear and discomfort while learning new skills over keeping people within their comfort zone. * We embrace experimentation as a constant practice over maintaining the status quo: * With people * With tools * With processes * With the environment * We believe our core practice is leading people, not wielding machines, so: * We embrace spending more time with our team than in meetings. * We embrace treating software problems as people problems. * We learn people skills and communication techniques. About the notes The second part of this book allows a peek into the minds of some of the best leaders, consultants, and managers as they give advice to a new team leader. Hear from Johanna Rothman, Kevlin Henney, Dan North, Uncle Bob Martin, and many others about the one thing they would like to teach you if you ever become a team leader, Scrum Master, project manager, or architect.

At most technology companies, you'll reach Senior Software Engineer, the career level for software engineers, in five to eight years. At that career level, you'll no longer be required to work towards the next pro? motion, and being promoted beyond it is exceptional rather than ex? pected. At that point your career path will branch, and you have to decide between remaining at your current level, continuing down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer, or switching into engineering management. Of course, the specific titles vary by company, and you can replace "Senior Engineer" and "Staff Engineer" with whatever titles your company prefers.Over the past few years we've seen a flurry of books unlocking the en? gineering management career path, like Camille Fournier's The Man? ager's Path, Julie Zhuo's The Making of a Manager, Lara Hogan's Re? silient Management and my own, An Elegant Puzzle. The manage? ment career isn't an easy one, but increasingly there are maps avail? able for navigating it.On the other hand, the transition into Staff Engineer, and its further evolutions like Principal and Distinguished Engineer, remains chal? lenging and undocumented. What are the skills you need to develop to reach Staff Engineer? Are technical abilities alone sufficient to reach and succeed in that role? How do most folks reach this role? What is your manager's role in helping you along the way? Will you enjoy being a Staff Engineer or you will toil for years to achieve a role that doesn't suit you?"Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track" is a pragmatic look at attaining and operate in these Staff-plus roles.

A human-centric guide to solving complex problems in engineering management, from sizing teams to handling technical debt. There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams—and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies. Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.

It is the fundamental challenge of the high-tech sector: A firm must innovate internally to succeed-yet its success may equally depend on corresponding innovations by external firms. Whether a company develops a ubiquitous operating system or the software that runs on it, a VCR or the movies we play on it, every participant in a high-tech network is vulnerable to the innovative moves of its partners and competitors. Yet, in spite of this perilous situation, some firms have developed strategies that have made them industry powerhouses and world-class innovators. How? By becoming platform leaders -companies that provide the technological foundation on which other products, services, and systems are built. Platform leadership is the Holy Grail of high-tech industries, but it is difficult to achieve. In Platform Leadership , high-tech strategy experts Annabelle Gawer and Michael A. Cusumano reveal how Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco, as well as companies including Palm and NTT DoCoMo, have orchestrated industry innovations to support their products-and, in the process, established dominant market positions. Based on these in-depth case studies and on incisive analysis, the authors present their Four Levers Framework for designing and implementing a successful platform strategy-or for improving an existing strategy: 1. Determine the scope of the firm : Is it preferable to create product complements internally or let the "market" produce them? 2. Design product technology strategically : What degree of modularity is appropriate? Should product interfaces be open or closed? What information should leaders disclose to outside firms? 3. Shape relationships with external complementors : How can the company balance competition and collaboration with outside players? 4. Optimize internal organizational structures : What processes and systems will allow the company to manage internal and external conflicts of interest most effectively? For executives, strategists, and entrepreneurs in many high-tech arenas, this book shows how firms can orchestrate innovation to ensure their own competitive futures-and drive the evolution of their industry. AUTHORBIO: Annabelle Gawer is Assistant Professor of Strategy and Management at INSEAD. Michael A. Cusumano is the Sloan Management Review Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School, editor-in-chief and chairman of the board of the Sloan Management Review , and coauthor of the bestseller Microsoft Secrets .

Software startups make global headlines every day. As technology companies succeed and grow, so do their engineering departments. In your career, you'll may suddenly get the opportunity to lead teams: to become a manager. But this is often uncharted territory. How can you decide whether this career move is right for you? And if you do, what do you need to learn to succeed? Where do you start? How do you know that you're doing it right? What does "it" even mean? And isn't management a dirty word? This book will share the secrets you need to know to manage engineers successfully. Going from engineer to manager doesn't have to be intimidating. Engineers can be managers, and fantastic ones at that. Cast aside the rhetoric and focus on practical, hands-on techniques and tools. You'll become an effective and supportive team leader that your staff will look up to. Start with your transition to being a manager and see how that compares to being an engineer. Learn how to better organize information, feel productive, and delegate, but not micromanage. Discover how to manage your own boss, hire and fire, do performance and salary reviews, and build a great team. You'll also learn the psychology: how to ship while keeping staff happy, coach and mentor, deal with deadline pressure, handle sensitive information, and navigate workplace politics. Consider your whole department. How can you work with other teams to ensure best practice? How do you help form guilds and committees and communicate effectively? How can you create career tracks for individual contributors and managers? How can you support flexible and remote working? How can you improve diversity in the industry through your own actions? This book will show you how. Great managers can make the world a better place. Join us.

Building on their breakthrough bestsellers Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s latest book shows software leaders and team members exactly how to drive high-value change throughout a software organization—and make it stick. They go far beyond generic implementation guidelines, demonstrating exactly how to make lean work in real projects, environments, and companies. The Poppendiecks organize this book around the crucial concept of frames, the unspoken mental constructs that shape our perspectives and control our behavior in ways we rarely notice. For software leaders and team members, some frames lead to long-term failure, while others offer a strong foundation for success. Drawing on decades of experience, the authors present twenty-four frames that offer a coherent, complete framework for leading lean software development. You’ll discover powerful new ways to act as competency leader, product champion, improvement mentor, front-line leader, and even visionary. Systems thinking: focusing on customers, bringing predictability to demand, and revamping policies that cause inefficiency Technical excellence: implementing low-dependency architectures, TDD, and evolutionary development processes, and promoting deeper developer expertise Reliable delivery: managing your biggest risks more effectively, and optimizing both workflow and schedules Relentless improvement: seeing problems, solving problems, sharing the knowledge Great people: finding and growing professionals with purpose, passion, persistence, and pride Aligned leaders: getting your entire leadership team on the same page From the world’s number one experts in Lean software development, Leading Lean Software Development will be indispensable to everyone who wants to transform the promise of lean into reality—in enterprise IT and software companies alike.

Summary Elastic leadership is a framework and philosophy that can help you as you manage day-to-day and long-term challenges and strive to create the elusive self-organizing team. It is about understanding that your leadership needs to change based on which phase you discover that your team is in. This book provides you with a set of values, techniques, and practices to use in your leadership role. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Your team looks to you for guidance. You have to mediate heated debates. The team is constantly putting out fires instead of doing the right things, the right way. Everyone seems to want to do things correctly, but nobody seems to be doing so. This is where leaders get stuck. It's time to get unstuck! Elastic leadership is a novel approach that helps you adapt your leadership style to the phase your team is in, so you can stay in step as things change. About the Book Elastic Leadership is a practical, experience-driven guide to team leadership. In it, you'll discover a set of values, techniques, and practices to lead your team to success. First, you'll learn what elastic leadership is and explore the phases of this results-oriented framework. Then, you'll see it in practice through stories, anecdotes, and advice provided by successful leaders in a variety of disciplines, all annotated by author and experienced team leader, Roy Osherove. What's Inside Understanding why people do what they do Effective coaching Influencing team members and managers Advice from industry leaders About the Reader This book is for anyone with a year or more of experience working on a team as a lead or team member. About the Author Roy Osherove is the DevOps process lead for the West Coast at EMC, based in California. He is also the author of The Art of Unit Testing (Manning, 2013) and Enterprise DevOps. He consults and trains teams worldwide on the gentle art of leadership, unit testing, test-driven development, and continuous-delivery automation. He frequently speaks at international conferences on these topics and others. Table of Contents PART 1 - UNDERSTANDING ELASTIC LEADERSHIP Striving toward a Team Leader Manifesto Matching leadership styles to team phases Dealing with bus factors PART 2 - SURVIVAL MODE Dealing with survival mode PART 3 - LEARNING MODE Learning to learn Commitment language Growing people PART 4 - SELF-ORGANIZATION MODE Using clearing meetings to advance self-organization Influence patterns The Line Manager Manifesto PART 5 - NOTES TO A SOFTWARE TEAM LEADER Feeding back Channel conflict into learning It's probably not a technical problem Review the code Document your air, food, and water Appraisals and agile don't play nicely Leading through learning: the responsibilities of a team leader Introduction to the Core Protocols Change your mind: your product is your team Leadership and the mature team Spread your workload Making your team manage their own work Go see, ask why, show respect Keep developers happy, reap high-quality work Stop doing their work Write code, but not too much Evolving from manager to leader Affecting the pace of change Proximity management Babel Fish You're the lead, not the know-it-all Actions speak louder than words

In this comprehensive yet accessible overview for software leaders, the author presents an impactful, action-oriented prescription-covering the practical considerations needed to ensure you reap the full benefits of effective Agile