
Ask HN: How do you avoid micromanaging? - kostarelo
Quite often I find my self watching others on my team very close, commenting on every PR, trying to have an opinion on every discussion, etc. While I understand I am doing it, at the same time I find it hard to stop my self, in the fear of things going &quot;wrong&quot; or not work.<p>Where do you draw the line when it comes to letting the team (or individuals) go on their own?
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lostdog
It's simple! Get a big enough team and you'll have to stop!

...

I found it useful to reframe my goals as a manager. Now my primary goal is to
set up systems and people so that if I went away for a month, the team would
keep functioning. With this goal, stepping in to prevent a single mistake is
now counterproductive, because you have squashed a learning opportunity that
would benefit your team long term. I now imagine that I have a budget of 5 or
so interventions per week. I can use them to prevent a problem, or offer
advice, or adjust a process. But I know that if I go over budget, I will
either overwhelm my team and break down their autonomy, or I will be trying to
do too much myself. Setting a goal of staying above the fray keeps me from
succumbing to the anxiety that I must always be improving everything I can
touch.

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sethammons
If the whole team is junior, your role is to mentor them. Set high
expectations and help them reach the results you require. If you have senior
members, lean on them to do that mentoring. I think it is appropriate to ask
quality questions: how are you measuring success and failure, what alerting
and monitoring is in place, what happens if condition $FOO occurs, how are you
measuring costs, etc. But your role shouldn't scale to reviewing all code
changes and likely should evolve to not looking at code at all. As a manager,
you are supposed to be a multiplier of your teams efforts and help them all to
level up. By interacting at the PR level, you are not multiplying their
efforts. I also recommend reading The Manager's Path

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muzani
Manage your team like building a machine. It should run on its own and keep
running without your input. If you're always micromanaging, it won't have room
to run on its own.

The role of many managers is to observe the team, relay/filter information
coming in from other teams and out to other teams.

At a later stage you can start to optimize the process. Observe common
mistakes and inefficiencies - things from sexual harassment to too many emails
dragging the team down. You don't always want to patch mistakes with more
tools and regulations, as every patch has a cost. Treat every problem like a
bug. Sometimes there is a root cause, which causes several problems at once.

