Mary Poppendieck -- The role of leadership in software development

Recently I keep finding lots of interesting stuff about team management. This time talk of Mary Poppendieck “The role of leadership In software development” came to my attention. I found it on Google's Tech Talks Channel. But what is it all about?

When you look around, there are a lot of leaders recommended for software development. We have the functional manager and the project manager, the scrum master and the black belt, the product owner and the customer-on-site, the technical leader and the architect, the product manager and the chief engineer.

Clearly that's too many leaders. So how many leaders should there be, what should they do, what shouldn't they do, and what skills do they need?

This will be a presentation and discussion of leadership roles in software development -- what works, what doesn't and why.

For me that introduction was interesting enough to spend 1 hour and 30 minutes watching the talk and after all I have to admit that it was absolutely worth it therefore I recommend you doing the same!




My main take-aways are:

• general overview how the concept of leadership was evolving staring from 1850 to present times. I was surprised how closely it was connected with army and how many important breakthroughs were triggered by wars.
• what really makes organisations work is not one standardized process and people that do exactly what is written down. In that model you can forget that people will be interested in process improvement, it's impossible to make a full use of people potential. Basically, it doesn't work!
• leader is a person with vision, leader's job is to communicated the vision, help the team members to understand it. Leader should act like a teacher, it's not his job to tell people what to do, his job is to tell people how things should work.

And finally, Mary was talking about three different kinds of leadership, here is a high level overview:

• Product leader -- it's a person which merges marketing knowledge (understands customers needs) and fairly high level technical expertise. Product leader should work closely with developers and is responsible for releases planing and making necessary tradeoffs.
• Functional leader -- this person should preserve knowledge and hold technical expertise leadership. Person like that should be responsible for solving the most difficult problems in all projects. Other important part of this role is to train people, help them getting better and grow to their full potential.
• Project leader -- funding, scheduling and tracking -- those are the main objectives for this role.

Those are the things which were particular interesting for me. Watch the talk and if you care to share then let me know what aspects were interesting for you.