These are based off my current experience in transitioning to a management role. I'm still a dev, but my manager is "testing me out" for a management role.
- Keep current on technologies, what your team uses and wants to use, and also technologies that might be useful.
- Know your developers' strengths and weakness, both technical and interpersonal.
- Time management. (Can't stress this enough).
- Ask lots of thoughtful questions (informed by the first item in the list).
- Develop relationships with other managers, teams and executives. If you want to manager bigger things, those guys need to see you and know you can do it.
- Don't hold grudges. At the end of the day, go home and forget about any bullshit that occurred.
- Trust your developers.
- Don't be afraid to say no.
- Take risks. Accept responsibility when those risks turn into failures.
- Give genuine praise.
One sort of cultural thing to keep in mind. It may not apply to you though. After moving to the Bay Area several years ago I noticed that behavior with organizations often defaults to passive-aggressive, especially when there's disagreement. Avoid being passive-aggressive and correct others (in a professional manner) when they're being passive-aggressive. I used to deal with more aggressive people when I worked on the East Coast. You know where you stand at least. PA behavior allows bad sentiment to stew and kills progress of any sort. Being assertive most of the time will solve this.
A corollary of managing passive-aggressive team members is to not hide bad project news from upset management. A project in trouble is unlikely to get back on track on its own. Management wants to help but needs to be able to trust your status reports.
Likewise, your job is to ship the project and you need your dev team's trust to do that, so you should look for new solutions and risk mitigations when raising project problems to management, not pointing blame or throwing people under the bus.
- Keep current on technologies, what your team uses and wants to use, and also technologies that might be useful.
- Know your developers' strengths and weakness, both technical and interpersonal.
- Time management. (Can't stress this enough).
- Ask lots of thoughtful questions (informed by the first item in the list).
- Develop relationships with other managers, teams and executives. If you want to manager bigger things, those guys need to see you and know you can do it.
- Don't hold grudges. At the end of the day, go home and forget about any bullshit that occurred.
- Trust your developers.
- Don't be afraid to say no.
- Take risks. Accept responsibility when those risks turn into failures.
- Give genuine praise.
One sort of cultural thing to keep in mind. It may not apply to you though. After moving to the Bay Area several years ago I noticed that behavior with organizations often defaults to passive-aggressive, especially when there's disagreement. Avoid being passive-aggressive and correct others (in a professional manner) when they're being passive-aggressive. I used to deal with more aggressive people when I worked on the East Coast. You know where you stand at least. PA behavior allows bad sentiment to stew and kills progress of any sort. Being assertive most of the time will solve this.