It can seem daunting to manage a tech team and build a product as a non-tech. However, I’ve found it to one of the most rewarding and fascinating journey’s to go from a non-tech to a CEO of a tech company. With so many free resources online and on Youtube, it’s easier than ever.
Here are some important principles on how to work with tech as a non-tech.
Actually, just like learning to ride a bike or to drive a car, I don’t think there is any way you can learn it by reading, you just have to get started doing it. To start on a smaller projects then work out and learn from different theories and ask people’s advice for help on specific problems.
Here are the 5 tools that I use to manage the tech team:
– OKR
– RICE Score
– Product Roadmap
– Weekly Scorecard
– EOD Update
OKRs – where do you want to go? It’s important to understand what the goal is of the organisation and then work with your tech team to create monthly targets. They don’t want to be micromanaged. It’s best to work with them to create a monthly goal so its something they are invested in. Here is some more about OKRs. https://www.whatmatters.com/faqs/okr-meaning-definition-example
RICE Score – there are often so many things that you want to do but you have limited time. So how do you prioritise it? The best way is the RICE score. Make a list of everything you want to accomplish, and give them a score for how much impact or how valuable they would be? and then talk to the developer to see how much effort it would take to make. That can be helpful to see what are the low hanging fruit – things that can be done easily but have a big impact, and also spot things that will have limited impact but huge time cost. https://www.productplan.com/glossary/rice-scoring-model/
Product Roadmap – it’s important to have a product roadmap so you can share how things are going to be developed. The next 1 year can be quite vague on details but the next 3 months can have more details in them. It’s important for the direction and product roadmap to be shared in advance in order to get their feedback, and also so they can develop the system with the future in mind. The GANT chart is similar to a product roadmap but its more detailed.
Weekly Scorecard – it’s really important to track all the key metrics and have a weekly scorecard that shows the key metrics of the organisation. I learnt this from traction which is the best business book I’ve read.
EOD / EOW updates. This is something I learnt from Jason Calacanis. Asking everyone in the team to give briefly daily or weekly updates to others helps to improve communication and keep people accountable to the rest of the team. This also means that you don’t need to micromanage and never need to ask someone what they’ve done today or plan is. You can then get straight to the important conversation.
I’ve also learnt that the best return on investment is just taking care of the team and understanding and helping them as people and friends. It builds trust and improves the relationship.
Do you have any tips and thoughts? Would love to hear your feedback.
