Hot answers tagged management
19
You are sadly deluded in thinking that your employees should work so much for you just because you think they should.
Why do you think making them work more hours is going to be a net benefit? It likely will not.
You think 55-60 is reasonable because you have a huge stake in the company. They do not. What makes you want to work there for so many ...
19
An employee abusing sick leave is obviously an annoyance, but it also has many other toxic effects on the rest of your team. For example:
Other employees start to wonder why they aren't getting more time off
Other employees resent that employee for not being a team player
Other employees resent you for letting him get away with the abuse
One of the ...
16
Ramping up your employee hours to 55-60 hours is going to end up ruining your startup. I get you think more hours equals more work which in turn equals a faster turnaround time for completion, but you're setting yourself up to fail.
An employer of which I will not name I previously worked at, well more-so the manager I worked with thought this was a good ...
11
How do I motivate someone who values his time significantly more than money to come to work on time?
Is the problem that he is just coming in late and that you like punctuality (in which case YOU should consider adapting) or does his coming late make a difference in the overall output?
Plenty of people think things should be done a certain way and expect others to do it that way. That's unfortunate because a) it may not be the best way and b) may be the ...
10
Speaking as a developer: absolutely yes, and absolutely never.
The most important skills of a manager transcend what the people you are managing actually do day-to-day. The best manager I ever had didn't know how to write a single line of code. What he did however was make a careful study of how it was that we did our jobs.
A manager should not (IMO) get ...
10
I'd advise you to judge people based on how they meet their deadlines, not the time they leave for home. I managed people whose 16 hour work day produces less than what other people do in 5 hours. After 20+ years as a developer and development manager, I can tell you no one really codes efficiently 16 hours a day, at least not continuously.
Wanting to amp ...
8
A crowded market means opportunity -- clearly there's a large demand too.
Also over-crowded markets often enter an acquisition phase where larger players consume the smaller ones, and that's a nice opportunity for an exit or to have less, and less nimble competition.
It probably means traditional marketing will be too expensive at first because it's hard ...
8
Have you thought about getting out of the 'punching a time clock' mentality? If this person is important, there must be specific tasks this person should be accomplishing. If he wants to get wrecked every Thurdsay night and call off on Friday, suggest making up for it on Sunday. If they're already getting things done, get over it and drop this policy.
7
There are a few ways you can do this. I'll talk about 2.
Method 1: Buy a professional license management product
I'm the founder of the company that makes LimeLM, which can be best described as hassle-free licensing & online activation. You can associate customer data directly with the licenses. For instance, for a particular product key you can add ...
7
I run a company that creates and manages web based tools that businesses subscribe to. My staff are all over the world (only 1/3 of our staff are in our state). So we are far more likely to experience what you mentioned than someone with all staff in a centralized location.
Some of our successful actions for the exact situation you are talking about are:
...
7
Code complete 1st edition, 1993. Still relevant.
To be frank, if reading books was the solution to your problem then every MBA or a software developer can become a successful CEO/CTO.
From your question, it seems your career is taking a big jump. From a developer to a CTO. I would suggest stop thinking about the CTO tag for a while. Look, your going to ...
7
If it was a local team I would say it is due to boring work. Great developers take motivation out of building great software. Maintenance periods, too much bug fixing, doing the same thing for too long are examples of things that will make their productivity go down.
In a remote team, you can take all of that in consideration, plus the fact that they might ...
6
Love the question!
Bit of background: I have been doing operations for almost my entire career and have had some incredible mentors along the way. Most fun 2+ years of my career were spent as a head of ops for an awesome software dev company we grew to 120+ devs (by the time I had to move). It was an honor serving some of the smartest devs in the market.
...
6
Here at Stack Exchange, we have chat software. We are using our own, but HipChat is acceptable. There is a main room in there that everyone is expected to be in (at least lurking) whenever they are at work... not being in the chat room is equivalent to not being at your desk. This has done wonders at creating a coherent company culture with people who are ...
5
I would always favor cutting features rather than delivering anything half finished. Do one small thing very well and you can can always document upcoming features in your product roadmap and add them in over time.
Release early, release often, is an overused mantra, but still has lots of value in it.
One idea... have you considered a private beta program ...
5
Depending on how far along your product is developed, basic landing pages with the purpose of gathering interest may prove to be a pretty fruitless, even unwise endeavor. Consumers are always motivated by what’s in it for them – so unless you have a pretty persuasive landing page (with good graphics and solid marketing/descriptions on what you offer), you’re ...
5
I voted for Chris and MichaelT's responses. Good answers.
You know, the common wisdom is that workers come to a job for the company but leave because of the boss. It sounds like you may be experiencing a common issue of poor management, perhaps exacerbated by the difficulties of a non-technical manager leading a technical team.
(That being said, I am a ...
5
Go over the 'interruptions' from the last month or so. See how many of them actually closed contracts, were implemented into the project, or otherwise made a positive net contribution.
If it looks horrible, then go to whoever owns the development process, and lay it out in a positive manner. Show what the problem is, and then start talking mutually ...
5
I'm an efficiency consultant, so I'm constantly evaluating project management tools for various clients. Most of them are awful and many of my clients are under-served even by the best solution available for their situation. (I specialize in working with highly-detail-oriented Type-A personalities, and at this point I'm just going to build my own solution ...
5
Hiring is tricky, most standard recruitment agents are nothing more than order takers ... They just tick off skills which isn't helpful, I have found 2 Recruiters that understand our company and our culture and have the ability to find suitable fits.
That said it took working with 15-20 different agenecies in 14 years to get these 2.
One bit of advice ...
5
First, let's focus on your actual problem: you've lost development productivity.
So your first question is, can you pull back some quality time, so you can get back on track with the roadmap?
It sounds to me that your issue is switching. Prospective customers want your time: that's excellent news for your start-up! Existing customers want your time: ...
4
Devs, UI/UXes, Enterprise Architects are artists and you can't manage artists (I've come to that conclusion after comparing my first 6 years in the talent management within entertainment industry with life in software dev industry after that), you need to LEAD them. Job of the manager/leader is to remove obstacles, provide tools, and create the environment ...
4
Worried? You should be more than worried.
I was in this situation once, and it hurt.And you need to be aware that you are now on a cash-flow trajectory that is vertical straight into the ground, and then keeps going.
You need to figure out a few things. I am assuming you have no other income, or not enough anyway.
Figure out how much you have earned or ...
4
If the client took you project back without cause, there should have been a buy out clause for you. If you had no contract or your contact didn't cover this, you should probably watch Mike Monteiro's talk about setting up good contracts.
On the other side, you have 25 people who know people who might need things done. Rather than them sit idle, you could ...
4
I agree with Tim - with a pre-profit company, everything about the company should be about achieving the common goal. Question is, what is being measured?
An example from a relevant slideshow on how startups operate - in this case, startup2startup:
What is your companies unit of measurement?
If it's just "advance to the next stage" or "a line of ...
4
This is one area where a small startup can do a much better job than a big corporation so try and take advantage of it. Atlassian, which is not a small company, prides itself for its "legendary support." http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/Support/How+to+Get+Legendary+Support+from+Atlassian
If you can do the same, it's one way to show that you're much ...
4
I'm going to take a little different approach to what I'm seeing on here so far. Everyone else seems to almost be saying "Time Off = Bad", and "Danger! Don't trust your team to take time off correctly!"
I just don't see it that way.
So this is as much a response to those other answers as it is to the question.
It kind of depends on who you're talking ...
4
If you are able to afford bonuses of over $1000, I'd give the bonus because money is more useful than a gift, especially in this economy. However, if you can only give a bonus of less than $1000, it's probably better to give a gift as your employees may feel like you are being cheap if you give money in that small of an amount. Ideas for gifts that won't ...
4
In a startup situation where the income is not particularly healthy yet, I used to look at it this way (although whether we actually outsourced depended on whether the budget would cope with it at the beginning)
Is it a task that is either
a) Menial or junior level
b) Totally outside our domain and likely to be a one off
The rationale being we could get on ...
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