Ask HN: How do you manage your development team?
I lead a modest team of 4 developers, and our entire company is 7 people.
We use Pivotal Tracker [1] to keep track of bugs and features, and a spreadsheet with a high level roadmap set quarterly.
Monday morning we have a development team meeting to review current/future tasks based on business/dev priorities.
This process is okay, but we find there are ad-hoc, mid-week challenges I'd love to tackle better:
a) How best to triage ad-hoc requests from sales (feature improvements/requests) or customers b) Resolving product bugs/integration issues that may appear and need to be resolved that week c) Responding to ad-hoc requests from BD (eg, produce a report). Google teaches me this is 'toil' and to look towards automating these tasks, which were done, but there are still fringe requests. d) Allow development to work in their own priorities (internal improvements, refactoring, bug fixes, tooling, ...) amongst feature requests and customer-facing bugs that need to be resolved e) Ideally we had someone dedicated each week to resolving issues/bugs, not new features, but never done this.
We have some techniques to address many of these, but I feel we could do a better job so that during the week we are shielded from ad-hoc changes of our priorities mid week.
Any feedback appreciated, thank you!