Last week, I wrote a technical team management note (1) on the spur of the moment – knowing people is quite popular, which makes me feel that this summary is more meaningful, so I should stick to it and try to organize a series.
If this series is fortunate enough to be a summary of the technology management road, the offshoots along the way are also interesting. I will try to organize the main idea at the same time to insert some small “dessert”, introduce some technical management careful and small skills, I hope to help you, looking forward to more friends can participate in the discussion, but also help me to organize the idea.
Today’s dessert is: How do technical managers report up
The definition of upward report here is that the technical manager reports to the business person on it, for example, the technical person reports to the CEO, the technical director reports to the BU business person, and the technical manager reports to the product person.
I’ve seen a lot of technical managers report things like this:
- I made a very professional TECHNICAL architecture PPT to report, listing the business architecture, technical architecture and deployment architecture, including the details of the cache, database and asynchronous queue currently used, and even the sequence diagram of interaction between various systems. The purpose of the presentation is to give people an understanding of the complexity of the current technology in order to get more resources to support it (such as hiring and expanding servers). In order to facilitate subsequent analysis and reference, we refer to it as “Professional technical PPT Report” for short.
- I often lead the team to work overtime to catch up with the schedule. In order to make the business side realize the hard work of technology, I often take photos of the team working overtime and share them on wechat moments, expecting the boss to see and like them. In order to facilitate subsequent analysis and reference, we refer to it as “Sharing overtime in moments of friends”.
- In the discussion of product requirements, as long as it is the turn of the technology to speak here, we can say as much detail as possible, as complex as we can, this is very troublesome for a week. It is not worth it to simplify the requirements. In a word, we hope to attach importance to technology and take the advice of technology as the criterion. In the future, we must call technology when discussing product requirements. It also helps manage product manager expectations and gives the team some space. In order to facilitate subsequent analysis and reference, we refer to it as “Highlighting technology in product Requirement discussion”.
In fact, there are some problems with all of these, before we analyze them one by one. Let’s still follow the style of rational analysis and disassemble and summarize. What is the purpose of reporting up as a technical manager?
Based on previous experience, there are about three points:
- Get more resource support (staff recruitment, server expansion, team work equipment upgrades, etc.)
- Expect to make more technical preparations before the project starts to facilitate the follow-up work (for example, make some preparations before the requirements are delivered, so that the follow-up progress and quality are easier to ensure)
- Be truly “technology driven” and use technology to develop products such as search, news flow, etc. (this is the most difficult one)
Let’s take a look at what the Marketing Department of a company would do if they reported up, as follows:
- Get more resource support (recruitment, marketing resource support, etc.)
- It is expected to make more preparations for market promotion before the launch of the product, so as to facilitate the follow-up work
- To be truly “market driven”, to launch some products with market leadership, such as brain platinum (the most difficult one)
Did you find it? There is a saying that the upward reporting of the technical department is more special than that of other departments. In fact, it is not true, the purpose of both is the same. If meet wang Xing, Zhang Yiming such technology CEO, that Marketing Department is more helpless and painful? How did meituan’s push team of tens of thousands of people build up?
This brings us to the core of the upward reporting approach: be results-oriented, clarify what resources the technical team needs to support, and then what it can accomplish and what it can bring to the company
Think back to when you saw the Marketing Department reporting to the CEO. They usually say something like this: We expect to increase sales by 30% this year, so by calculation, we need 5 million yuan for network promotion, 1 million yuan for Weibo, 2 million yuan for wechat and 2 million yuan for others. It was a simple and effective way of communicating, with a clear goal: to increase sales by 30%, which resources were needed: $5 million and its composition.
This is the way to report up. Think of your team as an independent company and your business leaders as angel investors. Be clear about the amount of resources you need to accomplish what you want and how valuable they will be to you. Don’t let your leader figure it out for you.
Let’s go back to the previous 3 examples and analyze them one by one, as follows:
| case | Original purpose | Actual effect |
|---|---|---|
| Professional technology PPT report _____ | Explain the complexity and challenges of current technology and look for more resources to support it | Business manager: what are you saying? I’m confused. Oh, I just want to hire people. Are you trying to trick me? Why does all development have to be MAC Pro, does it really make development more efficient? |
| Circle of friends share overtime _____ | Explain the team is very hard, expect not to force too hard, understand the pain of technical brothers | Sharing every day, isn’t that what you want me to like? Don’t you just worry about the technology, but the rest of the business is struggling too? And you guys are really bad at it. The system keeps crashing and you work overtime every day and you don’t see any output? |
| Highlight technology when discussing product requirements _____ | Highlight the importance of technology, products should not ignore the technical advice, to technology driven | We are the product, and are currently focused on whether the requirements are valuable to the user. How does this become a discussion of technical difficulty to implement? And the discussion took a long time. Anyway, if you can’t do it, just tell the CEO that the technology can’t do it. It doesn’t matter to me. But the discussion is still very tired, this kind of meeting in the future should not let technology to participate in ah? |
It is a pity that as a technical manager, the original intention was to pay more attention to technology and win more resources for the team, but the result of communication and reporting actually led to the loss of trust and support. The crux of the problem is that many technology managers still only focus on the first two words “technology”, and lose the latter “manager”. Once so, it is hard to avoid falling into the technology is not understood, technology is difficult to clear, technology is so helpless pain in the vicious circle of thinking (ha ha, there is a certain representative programmer thinking), you forget that you are actually a “manager” ah! As a technical manager, you should focus on “what resources the technical team needs and what they can do for the company!” That’s all it is! The tech climate, the engineer culture, the Slack collaboration tools, the MAC development devices — these are just your resources as a technology manager, as long as you speak up, these resources are available.
Continuing with the above three examples, we corrected them with a “results-oriented” approach, as follows:
| case | Correction method |
|---|---|
| Professional technology PPT report ______ | Modify the PPT, which only includes: how long does the current technical architecture need to support several potential business requirements in the future, the general division of labor of the current team, team configuration of other competitive companies in the industry, and server configuration. How many people we need to hire and how many servers we need to add can help the company to increase its business landing speed by 30% and ensure its stability to 99.9%, and the cost is only 2/3 of that of rival companies. (You may say, are you kidding me, to improve the speed and to maintain such high stability and low cost? Yeah, you’re the manager! The manager of any department is a single high-pressure result-oriented. If you can’t do it, you are not competent enough to be a manager. |
| Circle of friends share overtime ______ | Recently, the team has been working overtime, which has affected the stability of the system. It is expected that after this period of busy work, we can obtain about 2 weeks of dressing period to stabilize the system, and then meet the demand, which can guarantee to improve the development efficiency by 15% and stability by 20% |
| Highlight technology when discussing product requirements ______ | The technical realization of this function is indeed somewhat difficult, and it will take about 2 weeks with some risks. Please kindly evaluate the product. If it is really related to user experience, we will push forward according to this plan. In addition, could you please explain the general follow-up planning of this product? We can do some technical research and preparation before, so as to speed up the landing. |
This way of communication has firstly fulfilled our primary goal of “result-oriented, access to resources”, and by the way, let everyone know the hard work of the technical team and the persistence of user experience (your small selfishness can be naturally satisfied after satisfying the big goal :))
By the way, in addition to being “results-oriented,” the third point of “technology-driven” is that you really need to have some work on your hands. To put it simply, it requires a strong technical ability and a deep understanding of business logic. Search engines, news and information flow, and AI products are all such businesses. This is just a simple extension and will not be discussed in depth.
Reporting time here is also a brief explanation, under objective circumstances, the technical team does not have enough reporting time. There are probably the following solutions:
- A weekly results – oriented newspaper
- Get more people on the technical team reporting to the business side, not just you, and increase the firepower. Good leaders should produce more leaders
- Take the opportunity to initiate a conversation with your business leaders to elicit the need for technology based on what it will improve the business
Finally, to sum up, for a good technical manager, upward reporting should be “results-oriented, clear what resources the technical team needs to support, and then what they can achieve and bring to the company”. When setting the target results, we should consider the three dimensions of team capability, business value and implementation pace as far as possible. It is a good method to use simple and clear numbers.
In the next post, we will return to the main thread: Notes on Technical Team Management (II)- Bringing people