Goals and Results

Over at Managing Product Development:

I spoke with a program manager who’d been displaced from his program because he doesn’t scream or yell at people. (No, I’m not making this up. This is true.) He’s an effective program manager, because he doesn’t tell people to do this or that task. Instead, he tells them the goal and the results he’s after.

The replacement program manager has been telling people to do this task and that one, not providing context, and has been holed up in his office creating the ultimate Gantt chart.

Somewhere along the line we took a wrong turn. We forgot what we’re actually doing. The business guys got involved to help make things more “efficient” and attempted to turn it into a factory line process. Only the way they break down “tasks” doesn’t work in computing. They don’t have the domain knowledge in computing to break it down as it ought to be. And then they go and put metrics on their breakdown of the job at hand. I won’t even get into the Gantt Charts.

If you want developers to feel like they own something, tell them the end result that you want. Give them some constraints. Give them a vision. Make them believe the vision. Let them be creative. Leave them alone. Let them get the job done. Simple formula for success.