No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering teams

Summary

This article is for early-stage (Seed, Series A) founders who think they have engineering management problems (building eng teams, motivating and performance-managing engineers, structuring work/projects, prioritizing, shipping on time). The gist: if you think you have these problems, it is likely that the correct solution is to do nothing, to not manage, and to go back to building product and talking to users. Put another way, and having managed teams at all scales, I don’t think it’s a good use of your time as a founder to be "managing" engineers at such an early stage. In the following sections, I'll go through the most typical anti-patterns I've seen, and try to highlight a better use of your time if you think you've hit the situation in question. Do not try to "motivate" your engineers A common concern of many founders is making sure that their engineers are working hard. This could mean putting in long hours, working more than competitors, completing heroic codebase rewrites, etc. When these external signs of effort seem to be missing, founders worry that the team is not "motivated", and it can be very tempting to treat symptoms over causes. For example: creating cultural norms around putting in long hours (996-style culture) by either requiring or celebrating them scheduling recurring or non-urgent meetings on weekends (e.g. standup on Saturdays) micro-managing tasks, or asking people for status reports and other evidence they worked hard These anti-patterns share one thing in common: they start with founders trying to actively do something to motivate the team. This has 2 consequences: This can cause the very engineers you want to retain (those who have many options) to self-select out of your engineering culture. I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is mentioned. You are wasting your mental energy on the wrong problem All of this is a long way of saying that motivation is an inhe...