It is always a dilemma whether staying as an active coder or being manager. I still love to code, but I somehow always get trusted to be the one who manage.

Last year at my previous work (a matured 100+ years company), I obliged to lead a project as the previous two (yes, it was two persons before) one got promoted, one got transfered to other city. Conditions on the project: first time working together with vendor (3rd party) build the app, also first try to implement scrum, total around 20+ people working on the project. With no one have ever experience on a scrum model, this project become quite catastrophe. Almost never achieve the target set on each two weeks, a daily standup that’s not sophisticated, I don’t know how to detailing the task, and so on.

Moving to a startup, it is the first time I experience how a scrum run. Sprint grooming, sprint planning, set the story point, do the daily standup, and retrospective at last day of sprint. I learn what went wrong on my previous project and if I can go back in time I know what’s need to be done.

In the couple months, I trusted to lead the payment squad with total only 4 people. 2 is on probation and my challenge to them is completed well. But I fail to catch a problem that happen to the one left. She resigned with feeling that her existence is not important, and seems like as a woman her voice is being ignored. Whether it is true or not, I fail to catch the problem even it is not related directly to the work.

Manage the core squad 3 months later is quite easy as the team is mature enough. Everyone know what they’re doing and each one has high self awareness. Most of the time I still can do coding.

Big challenge come when I need to lead the backend from 3 different squad at the same time, while also still manage the core team. This is also the first time joining a full product team (before it’s just the building the API or work with infra). So I need to know the whole why a feature must build, what’s the requirement, how it works on the web and mobile app, working closely with frontend and mobile team.

Having a good experience before with a team that have high self awareness, I’m being less worry and just relax. I almost try to left it to the team without doing much with hope everything can be done as expected. Sadly, is not. Even I have some senior engineer level on the team, the team still need to be monitored and managed well. I do even lose the timelines of the target with the squads as it is too much to handle while I still trying to code.

With multiple experience I have managing the team, these are the lessons learned

• It’s hard handling a big team, like consist of more than 15 or 20 people. When you have it, you need to separate it to different group and choose a lead to each group.
• You need to learn how you will run the team, what framework will you use. And make sure your team also know about it.
• As manager, you will also being a mentor to the team. Do not ever skip the one on one session at least once a month or two.
• Each team is different. Well, you can still learn the experience from any team, however sometimes you can’t did the same way for those.