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Yesterday, I was having a heated discussion on a ticket. Let’s just say I was disagreeing with someone else on said ticket, and as in any discussion, each time I posted a comment, I had to wait for the reply.
But how did I know when I got that reply? Not from the ticket page, which wouldn’t show me if the other person was writing and of course didn’t update itself when a reply was sent. Alas, I had to wait for the Slack notification, which prompted me to refresh the page.
This morning, I woke up with 52 new emails from Jira. 52 is actually an okay day, it could be much worse! And like every day, I spend half an hour going through all the updates. I go through those updates and open a page in my browser for the tickets I need to have a better understanding of. After that, I have dozens of Jira browser tabs open, and then I go through each one of them, one at a time. This is a loooong process every day. And the worst of it is that when I’m done, I feel like I should be happy about it, but hey — here comes a new update. So I don’t even get that feeling of relief. The only way to cope with this is to book some notifications-off time in my day. I know some people who just turn them off; I feel like I should do that as well…
Does that sound familiar? But maybe, just maybe, there could be a better way…well, a LOT better way.
We’ve all been part of this debate about whether we should have an open-plan office or not. In general, executives would advocate for the open-plan office, while the individual contributors will say, “Please, no!!!” Executives won’t listen because they feel they are the only ones who can see the full picture clearly enough to make this decision. Apparently, 70% of all offices now have an open floor plan.
So I was wondering if maybe we could make a very rational analysis of this matter with an objective methodology. Then, perhaps, we can agree on what’s the best for the company (although you may never convince an executive what’s the best for your developers, unfortunately). And finally, we can discuss what can be done if you’re stuck with an open office.
At Anaxi, we don’t have a product manager. Seem weird? We’re not the only ones to do that. For instance, that’s also the case at Apple. But in our case, this role is spread out across our remote engineering team. In this article, I will detail why we do this and how we do it. To be honest, there are many things we’re still iterating on, and refining our processes will just be a constant effort, as it should be in every company. Note that our process works for any engineering team, working together in the same office or remotely.
In our particular case, our target customers are developers and engineering managers (and later on, product managers). So our engineering team also happens to represent our own customers. It stands to reason that they should have deep insights on what has value and what has less, probably more than a non-technical product manager who thinks they can understand the audience.
I hate articles where the headlines are provocative, but you have to read all the way to the end for the answer. So I’m going to give you the answer right now, and then explain why.
Your one job as a manager is to give a clear direction to your team and remove any roadblocks in its way.
(Well, technically I suppose that is two but they are so closely related I consider them one.)