

Ask HN: What book or media resource would you recommend on team management? - yeukhon

Hi.<p>I&#x27;m currently like a &quot;team lead&quot; (not officially yet) and I am very young. Part of my daily duty is work closely with my supervisor, manage our JIRA queue, and handle requests coming from business and developers (I work as a DevOps). I am now considered &quot;escalation&quot; in my team so I can spend more time on management and other major engineering efforts underway. I absolutely love what I do: the kind of opportunity I am given (judging by my title and experience) blows people&#x27;s mind.<p>I don&#x27;t think I am terrible at being the person doing management work. That being said, I am beginning to feel the pain to<p>1) having a good oversight with what people are working on, and keeping track of their progress (we use Jira, but still doesn&#x27;t yield the best result I hope)<p>2) prevent my team from being overloaded (i.e. prioritize tickets)<p>3) maintain a good level of autonomy in my team<p>I just proposed to have a daily stand-up, and we will start that next week (it worked quite well with my previous team).<p>What lessons did you learn when you first start to manage a team? Are there any book or media resource that have helped you become a better manager? The rest of my small team are distributed, remote workers.<p>Thank you!
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MichaelCrawford
I personally don't even apply to jobs if I know they're going to have a daily
standup. This because I prefer to work at night; by the time the standup
occurs, I want to be home in bed.

I don't have a problem making a weekly meeting, no matter what time it is.

Keep an eye on code checkins, how many bugs are marked resolved and by who, as
well as how many really end up closed by QA. Some managers don't do this with
the result that when coders are running into trouble, and either are unwilling
or don't know to ask for help, it's way too late by the time management finds
out.

Have a look at the Portland Patter Repository at
[http://c2.com/](http://c2.com/)

I recommend the Team Software Project book, I think it's by Watts Humphreys of
the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.

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CookWithMe
Very high on my reading list is "Leading Snowflakes"... but since I didn't
read it yet, take it with a grain of salt.

Since you mention that you're working in a distributed team, I've read Remote
by 37 signals. It was mostly advertising on why one should work remote, but it
has some bits on how they manage their remote workers which you may find
useful. However, I overall felt the book was rather light on content/substance
as someone who has read about and tried remote working before.

Good Luck! :-)

