Eight Questions I Had Every Day As A Dev Team Lead — LinearB

When I was a software development manager, there were a lot of questions. Questions that my boss asked me. Questions that I had myself. Questions that arose when discussing work with my team. And most of these were questions to which I did not have a good answer. I couldn’t respond well to them because I didn’t have the data necessary to give a definitive answer.

The data was there, but without a way to get at it, I often felt like I was stumbling in the dark. But all is not lost. Here are eight questions that I had, and ways that data inside your tools can be used to answer them.

How quickly is work moving through our pipeline?

One of the most important things that you need to know as a Dev Manager is how long things are really taking to get done. Not how many hours something is worked on, but rather how much actual calendar time it is taking to get a given user story or project from start to finish.

Most often, success was defined as completing things by a certain date. I’d break things down into sub-tasks, estimate those tasks, and then keep an eye on things. We’d make mid-course corrections by the eyeball test. But it was all an imprecise science at best.

First, breaking things down into workable chunks is hard. The chunks may or may not be appropriately sized, and they may or may not be correctly estimated. And of course, a given sub-task isn’t really done until it’s…