Comment by ptr
2 years ago
Great teams self-manage. Managers and management generally exist to ensure a baseline, but they can’t really do much more. In a strong team, everyone displays leadership properties, and they typically don’t listen to non-technical management.
Great teams manage their productiviry themselves, but don't work in a vacuum. Whether their output is properly evaluated and rewarded entirely depends on their manager.
If they increased their product KPI by 150% but their manager had the goal at 200%, your team's suddenly underperforming. If they need 2 more engineers to fill specific spots, the manager will be the one pitching it to HR and convincing upper management to green light the expense. Same for the team budget in general, same for company-wise deadlines, resource allocations, what growth opportunity the memebers get. And so on, and so on.
There's a myriad of super critical things that members take for granted but go through their mamager and get screwed when the manager is bad at its job.
Those teams seem pretty rare though. It also requires an org that lets the team not listen. Also what exactly is non-technical management? In most tech companies most managers are with a technical background. The problem is that they naturally drift further away from technology when not practicing it.