Slides from my September 28th presentation at the Dev session of the 2016 Baltimore Innovation Week Dev Talk.

1. MEETINGS
ABOUT
SPREADSHEETS
Lessons from my first 6 months
as a tech manager
Alex C. Viana
Terbium Labs

3. SOME CONTEXT
Started at Terbium Labs September, 2014. (3 employees)
Transitioned to VP of Engineering in April, 2016. (14 employees)
Currently 18 employees with 9 in engineering including a CTO.
Responsibilities include those of a personnel manager, product
manager, QA manager, release manager, and senior engineer

4. INTRO
“The goal of teaching is to pass on what we know
faster than we learned it”
1. Get out of the way.
2. It’s your job to answer questions.
3. Answer questions with process.
4. Take out the garbage.

5. GET OUT OF THE WAY
The first and best piece of advice I got.
You will block on every time-sensitive technical task you take on.
You need to get out of the way and let your engineers do their
work.
Good news! You can now build those fun non-critical tools for your
team on your down time.
You will feel unproductive but it’s not your job to just write code
anymore.
What should you be doing instead?

6. ANSWER QUESTIONS LIKE IT’S YOUR JOB
Hint: It is your job.
You need to be able to answer or find the answer to
any question from your technical team.
And answer in context of how it relates to tech,
staffing, product, sales, marketing, QA, etc.
This means you’re going to have to go to “meetings
about spreadsheets” to know what going on across
the company.
How can you reduce the number of question and get
back to your sweet sweet code?

7. LET QUESTIONS DRIVE PROCESS
Bad news, you’re going to start talking like a manager.
When questions arise think about why they needed to be asked in
the first place?
Why wasn’t this written down?
Why wasn’t this already communicated?
Why is this being done in different ways?
Can someone take the lead on this?
You now get to engineer process instead of just code.

8. TAKE OUT THE GARBAGE
Taking out the garbage is a bummer. A house full of
garbage is worse.
Schedule (and stick to) doing recurring tasks that are
only manageable if doing regularly.
Going through your issue backlog and PRs.
Planning your sprints.
Meet with other teams and give updates
Checking in with your developers and giving
feedback.

9. THANKS!
@AlexVianaPro