Yeah, in my experience this is “boundary setting” — and it’s absolutely critical to a healthy dev culture.
When I was a baby manager, I focused hard on Agile process and deadlines / roadmap commitments. And you’re right; it completely ruined my relationship with my team. They saw me as a representative of the oppressive corporate overlords, which is totally fair because those were the people I was trying to impress.
It took a few failed projects for me to get it through my thick skull that “doing things right” meant protecting my team from this behavior pushed down from above. It meant giving them space to do the job we paid them for. I realized I was letting my anxieties overrule people who knew way more about the issue than I did. It meant listening more and pushing back on unreasonable requests.
And it turned out my boss didn’t care about missed deadlines for the most part — he cared way more about production incidents. The best way to reduce production incidents is to work deliberately and not take unnecessary risks. A side effect of this was that we had way more power to say “no” to other teams, which made maintaining the code base a lot easier.
> protecting my team from this behavior pushed down from above
OT, but it's super common to hear in management circles about how managers are supposed to "protect" or "shield" their teams from the nasty CTO or CEO or some powerful stakeholder. IMO this is just not sustainable.
A CEO or any powerful person pushing a manager too hard accomplishes absolutely nothing at best, and is a disaster at worst. This kind of thing really hurts the morale and culture of the whole company.
Glad to know your boss is one of the good ones. My current CTO is like this and compared to the company I was in before it's night and day.
Tbh this is exactly what the article is talking about :)
If an organization has the right customer focus, internal deadlines should be meaningless. Customer-focused orgs are generally better places to work overall because there is a shared sense of what is important.
When I was a baby manager, I focused hard on Agile process and deadlines / roadmap commitments. And you’re right; it completely ruined my relationship with my team. They saw me as a representative of the oppressive corporate overlords, which is totally fair because those were the people I was trying to impress.
It took a few failed projects for me to get it through my thick skull that “doing things right” meant protecting my team from this behavior pushed down from above. It meant giving them space to do the job we paid them for. I realized I was letting my anxieties overrule people who knew way more about the issue than I did. It meant listening more and pushing back on unreasonable requests.
And it turned out my boss didn’t care about missed deadlines for the most part — he cared way more about production incidents. The best way to reduce production incidents is to work deliberately and not take unnecessary risks. A side effect of this was that we had way more power to say “no” to other teams, which made maintaining the code base a lot easier.