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How to be a Software Program Manager

“Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.

Charles Simonyi, the brilliant programmer who co-invented WYSIWYG word processing, dated Martha Stewart, made a billion dollars off of Microsoft stock and went into space, first tried to solve the Mythical Man Month problem of organizing really big software teams by creating one super duper überprogrammer writing the top-level functions, while handing off the implementation of the lower-level functions to a team of grunt junior-programmers as needed. They called this position program manager. Simonyi is brilliant, but this idea, not so much. Nobody wanted to be a grunt junior programmer, I guess.”

From Joel on Software. This is an excellent, perhaps exhaustive, description of how best to manage software development projects. It’s a wonderful read, too. This article is excellent background for non-programmers as well as anyone involved in software programming.

In theory, software development should be amenable to the same processes used for any large scale creative project, for example, paintings where the assistant(s) set up the general work and the artist fills everything in, architectural photography (same dynamic: assistant(s) set up, the photographer comes in to add value), and so on. But software is notorious for failing when traditional organizational methods are used, as Spolsky notes in the quote above.

This article also has great insights, for example, making sure the program manager and programmers are peers and equals. This guarantees debate. Otherwise, if programmers report to the program manager or, worse, the development manager also is the program manager, then there is no debate among equals. Bottomline, the software program manager must be an advocate for the user and must earn the respect of the programmers and win them over to their user-centric solutions.

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