We Need to Put Managers in Management Roles

So I will say it again: we need to put managers in management roles. I will clarify my point below:

• A manager is not the person who needs to know every business rule involved in the product, or every request and response of a specific part of the system. That is why we have business analysts, product specialists, and domain experts.
• A manager does not need to know every UI/UX detail, every if and else in the code, what every class does, or why a database is not returning the expected information. That is why we have designers, tech leaders, developers, testers, and architects.

So what does a manager do?

A manager organizes activities, processes, people, priorities, and information. Beyond that, managers are responsible for helping the team understand what should be done, what should not be done, and why. They are also responsible for making decisions, clarifying trade-offs, managing expectations, and explaining the direction to everyone involved.

When it comes to information, managers are responsible for separating, organizing, and communicating the right information to the right people. A developer should not receive the same information, in the same format, as a CTO. A stakeholder should not receive the same level of detail as a technical team. Communication must change depending on the audience.

This is exactly where many companies fail. They promote someone technically strong and expect that person to automatically know how to manage people, priorities, conflicts, expectations, risks, and executive communication. But technical excellence and management capability are not the same thing.

A platform like Saint Jude can help managers in this transition by giving them better visibility over what is happening in the project: task quality, productivity, cost, schedule, risks, sprint deviations, team performance, and delivery predictability. But even with data, the manager still needs to know how to interpret the information, communicate it properly, and make decisions based on it.

However, I have not yet presented the key skills that a manager must have and that are often not as developed in other roles:

The famous soft skills

• A soft skill is being able to find a solution when two parties are tired of arguing and the problem is not moving forward.
• A soft skill is explaining to a client, politely and clearly, that a completely unreasonable request will not be fulfilled because it does not make sense for the product.
• A soft skill is guiding the team toward a delivery that can open a new market for the company, while protecting the team from random requests coming from every direction.
• A soft skill is saying no to a director, even if it creates personal risk, when a request cannot be fulfilled because the team is already at 100% capacity or because the request does not make sense.
• A soft skill is knowing how to transform technical information into business language so that executives, stakeholders, and teams can make better decisions.

For all these reasons, I want to emphasize one point: the role of a manager can be learned, but it must be learned. It is not a gift that automatically appears after years of technical experience, after building a successful product, or after an app goes viral on the internet.

Managing is a profession. It requires method, communication, emotional intelligence, prioritization, negotiation, decision-making, and the ability to create clarity in the middle of uncertainty.

And for those who are interested, there are courses in universities around the world that teach people how to become managers. There are also books, certifications, mentors, frameworks, and, most importantly, real practice.

Do not do what everyone else does. If you want to manage, learn how to manage first.

What do you think? Do you agree? Like this short article, comment on LinkedIn, or share it on your social networks.

See you soon!

Erik Scaranello