Ask HN: How to manage a team when you don’t know the tech | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to manage a team when you don’t know the tech

3 pointsdoitLP5 comments

I recently started as a manager at a smallish company working on <complex tech>. I inherited a team of mixed skill level and tenure.

I think I’m pretty good at people management and generally organizing work and protecting the team. But I’m having real trouble delivering more value because I just don’t have domain knowledge either as a domain-specific developer or end user.

I’ve managed teams before but I was somewhat, or very familiar with the domain, allowing me to engage in much deep conversations with stakeholders up to unblocking the team by taking on design or architecture work that enabled others to come in behind me with a solid scaffolding in place.

I am reading and studying outside of work when I can but with 3 small kids I can’t do much. It seems like I need months of dedicated study and a couple of practical projects under my belt to get up to speed and feel useful instead of just asking for status and estimates like a useless middle manager.

What do you do? Have you had a manager in this position that handled it well? Should I just keep plugging away?

I would need to know more about the particulars of your situation to provide better advice. However, some thoughts:

1. Knowing the tech would definitely help. However, learning complex tech is not easy and takes significant amount of time. For some, it may not even be possible. 2. Is there a senior dev in the team with whom you can share project ownership? A person you can bounce ideas from? 3. Understand what your job really is. What are you there to manage? The timeline? What work gets prioritized? How work gets communicated to stakeholders? In many cases these do not require tech expertise since the time estimates, complexity, etc can be provided by a tech lead and you can work on negotiating those with stakeholders and deciding what is in and out of scope based on said estimates. However, it requires you to have a lead that you can trust.

Seconded, pacarvalho has generously offered you great advice :)

Figure out what your success criteria is and work backwards from there. And learn the core tech! Buy a book, take a course in your free time, whatever it takes.

Learn the tech or come to grips with the fact that you're going to be a (useless) dunce from here on out. Doesn't sound too appealing.

Do what needs to be done -- Buckle down and get a handle on the core technology!

Otherwise how will you evaluate good vs. bad, and avoid being misled or hoodwinked by clueless noobs?

Figure out something useful you can do that other devs do today that isn’t strictly the hard tech ie pulling data and analyzing it. Next time this is asked of your team, say “I’ll do it” even if it requires you to ping the dev who usually does it to walk you through. Imo these kinds of things go a long way and you’ll build some trust/respect as you learn the domain and tech. The key here is to find something that isn’t just typical middle manager stuff.

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