MBA career: How to change from technician to management Daniel

Article | GM (founder of party play)

All internet companies, including start-ups, have a lot of technical cattle, these technical cattle of the depth of the technology stack has reached a certain level, in their world, there is no need to achieve, there is no solution to the problem.

But we seldom see talented people who are both technically and in management.

Direct point, technical cattle how to develop their own management capacity, transformation into qualified technical management it.

Perhaps people will say that this is a pseudo proposition, because most of the technical bull people simply disdain to do management, they think that the management of those trivial waste of time and meaningless, management position is a position that can not reflect their value, they just want to drill deeper and wider.

In fact, technology management is not an independent position, and technical management is integrated into every stage of technology development, for example, any team collaboration involves a division of tasks, and any technical team involved in code specification, consolidation, and management, all of which need to be managed by a technician rather than a project manager. Therefore, the immediate reluctance to do management of technical personnel, development to a certain stage, more or less involved in the management of relevant content.

The career development process for a technician is roughly the same:

Internship

Still in school, never involved in real projects or projects, during the internship through the Reading project code, fix bugs, etc. began to accumulate experience, every day will feel that they harvest very large, time is not enough;

Recent Graduation

The experience is not much, reference project other module code, can complete the small function requirement independently, can be competent small module development, also can maintain project generation;

2-5 Years of work

Capable of any function module development, and began to do module design and system design, the design of things themselves can be used, well done may also be able to give others;

More than 5 years of work

Responsible for the entire project architecture design, implementation of the Project Foundation and core modules.

The first three stages of thinking are to consider how they do, how to achieve the function, how to complete the task. By the fourth stage, it will start to involve the management of the work, because, first of all, your things are no longer for you to use, you need to explain and communicate with others, second, your architecture and core modules come out, you need to assign the rest of the task to the appropriate members to develop.

I think the transition from a technical post to a managerial position is not a change in ability, but a change in mindset and mindset.

Technical manager is a kind of manager, the three core responsibilities of managers:

Establish the team's goals.

No matter the project size, must have the goal, has the goal to let everybody clear the direction, knows the meaning of the daily work where, the work is not toward the team goal in step by step close. Pure technical personnel of the executive thinking should switch to macro-thinking, because now individual success is not called success, team success is success, how to let the team output high performance is the problem you should think about.

We still lack resources to reach this goal.

This is mainly related to the overall planning capacity. In the early stages of the project, you need to be very clear and clear about the current team's capabilities and the resources you can deploy in order to ensure that the end result is not due to lack of resources.

How we move towards our goals.

This interspersed throughout the process, is the most important, and I have been playing in the party in the past two years in the management of the team to see and experience the deepest, it includes all aspects of technical management.

If a person does need m hours to complete, then N (n>1) individual to do, the theory of work is m/n, but the actual time must be more than this, the result is (m/n) *α (α>1), α is the cost of collaboration.

What a technical manager has to do is to minimize the cost of collaboration, including the following:

　　Task Assignment

Before you can do a good job, now how to ensure that a group of people to do it well. Task assignment includes how to assign the task to the right person, to achieve the best result, that is, the value of human is embodied and the output quality is high. This requires the manager to understand the task thoroughly, to the team each person's ability to understand also to be accurate.

　　Global View

Technicians need to focus on their work, in turn, as technical managers, to prevent over-concentration. To understand all aspects of the project progress and existing problems, the project and the team of any details of the knowledge, any large and small problems can be quickly positioned and analyzed to resolve, not because of focus on technical details and lose the global control.

　　Communication Skills

Once a day and machine communication, and now switch to communicate with people. The previous defiant and disdain is due to the strong technical ability, now should switch to more patient, more attention to tone and word communication. In addition, more to proactively identify problems, and then through communication skills to solve the problem.

　　coordinated scheduling capability

The project process will encounter some unexpected technical problems resulting in the project is block, if the problem has been unresolved, it is necessary to timely dispatch of competent people to participate in the resolution, to prevent the project has been in an indeterminate state. When multiple functions or projects are in parallel, due to limited human resources, it may be necessary to continuously adjust the priority of each project according to the progress of the project to ensure overall progress. Priority scheduling and tuning is a complex process, but remember that we always only do the highest priority things, when the highest priority things are done, the second thing in priority will naturally escalate to the highest priority thing, in this upgrade process, We may also need to make a priority dynamic adjustment or assessment with the relevant department of the product. This also involves negative feedback on project management, allowing each phase of the results to be fed back to a new phase, ensuring that the final results are closer to our goals.

　　Time Management capability

Time management is a headache for every team and is directly reflected in the progress of the project. Time management looks difficult, and actually it's simple. Each task split must be thin enough to quantify, 2 days or more of the task is unreasonable. And the process needs to strictly control each of the quantified good time node or milestone, to ensure that the quality of each node and point in time is the best way to ensure the end result, any delay will need to be forced to find a timely remedy, to avoid a little bit, so as to prevent the final project can not expect the delay.

　　Decentralization and development

Personally to solve the specific technical problems, do code review to see where the code is not standardized, and testers to discuss the specific test case is reasonable, these work now need to do, but they are no longer your focus, you should be more decentralized let others do, in this process must not be pro- On this basis, you should pay more attention to the training of members, training their ability to learn, thinking and problem-solving skills (these three skills are my basic requirements for technical staff), so that members quickly progress and growth, independently.

Listen

Regardless of the previous technology more than cattle, more rely on and defiant, as a manager, need to bear the team's mission and performance, so should at any time actively listen to the team's core members of the views, to be a good listener. Listen, be sure to listen to multiple dimensions, then analyze and make decisions.

Can do and practice good above these points, congratulations you have become a good technical management personnel.