Mistakes that every developer/manager can and should avoid in their career.
What you are going to read is a collection of lessons learned by me over the course of my career by working for different product startups and entrepreneurs in the capacity of leadership either as a Tech Lead or a Manager.
Context
I never interned. I started my career as a Full Stack Developer in a startup and all the team got hired under me. I was soon made the Tech Lead.
Post that in my subsequent jobs, I worked as a Tech Lead and managed an average of 5 people in my team. Now that I am working as a Senior Technical Product Manager, I have an even bigger team and tasks to manage.
But the lessons that I learned through this journey still remain the same and so do the mistakes that I see people make who I see around in different roles.
Learnings
- Focus on your core skill set. It's easy to say no to any additional task that you are not 100% sure of than taking it and not delivering fully.
- Be focused and active on the project. Never go on an easy mode. It's a war be a soldier.
- Don’t be a friend to your junior and team members, give them respect, appreciate them, learn and teach them but don’t be one of them, because that’s not what you are brought in for.
- If you are a senior executive, behave like one.
- Stay loyal to the management and then the team because management pays your salary, not the team.
- You owe to the management first and then the team etc.
- Stay one step ahead of the team.
- Allow all the information and resources to reach out to your team only via you, don’t allow the management to directly give orders and take feedback.
- Document everything religiously, about the project, team, and their performance.
- Don’t take new projects, if you don’t have adequate resources. Learn to say NO.
- Write team-friendly code and don’t take shortcuts until proven, there is a reason something exists.
- If you don’t know anything, don’t start it before learning it pre-hand. Put it on hold, and learn. Or find the best person to do it and learn from him/her.
- Explore more, read more, and try more, be ahead of the curve.
- Don’t fail to experiment. Keep a slotted period for that as well.
- Don’t claim yourself to be a “know-it-all” person, always say, you have knowledge about it but are not an expert.
- Maintain a balanced and dedicated schedule for work, personal life, and learning.
- Learn to devise exact deadlines and timelines with the proper breakup of tasks and BEAT the deadline.
- Before committing any deadline, ask for a few hours or days to break it down or give a tentative deadline on a higher side with a sufficient buffer.
- Break the problems into smaller modules and the modules further into smaller tasks, each one for a day or week, and then assign the tasks to individuals with respective skill sets.
- Take daily feedback of work from the team members and analyze the progress in order to understand the likely hood of missing or beating the deadline.
- Be strict with daily tasks with each member. Don’t be easy on them, you get paid to get the work done not to be easy on them.
- Don’t please anyone and everyone, you can’t, no one can. You will only fail at it big time.
- Only give break, when it is meant for not when they need it.
- Keep control of the project.
- Don’t be afraid of losing the job. Be fearless and have an opinion.
Post Script
Now, this might seem a very obvious thing to read but trust me the number of people, irrespective of their profile or designation that make this mistake is a lot and most of the time they just don’t know what should be done in such situations or fear asking questions or help regarding these issues.
Thus, I feel it's very important for people with experience or who have gone through similar issues to list it down or share their wisdom in public for others to take benefit of it.
I hope these lessons will help you in some way or the other. At least that’s the motive.
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