VIEW SPEECH SUMMARY
Context and Challenges:
- The speaker shares a personal experience during company restructuring, where team leaders had to manage multiple teams instead of one.
- Initially felt empowered with more projects and teams.
- Encountered a bottleneck situation, becoming the sole decision-maker for prioritization, leading to delays and burnout.
- Problems arose when teams awaited directions or made random task choices due to lack of clear prioritization.
- Over-involvement in prioritization caused loss of ownership and creativity within teams.
- Being a single point of failure increased risk for the company and personal burnout.
Key Realizations:
- Good leadership means being present but not controlling every prioritization detail.
- Prioritization must be a continuous, integrated team practice, not solely manager-driven.
- Teams need context and understanding of business goals to make effective trade-offs.
- Information and decision-making should remain human-centered and accessible.
Solutions and Practices:
- Use prioritization frameworks as conversation starters (e.g., impact vs effort), not as rigid decision-makers.
- Encourage transparency and stakeholder involvement to clarify priorities.
- Implement first ranking selectively for urgent, high-pressure situations to bring clarity.
- Foster ongoing communication between development, sales, support, and product teams.
- Utilize tools like Team Compass (or Agile Compass) to guide teams in making prioritization decisions independently.
- Document prioritization rules clearly, specifying preferences with reasons ("We prefer X over Y because Z").
- Conduct post-mortems to learn from prioritization mistakes and refine decision-making.
- Recognize the limits of intuition—it’s valuable but hard to transfer; systems and heuristics help scale influence.
- Shift manager role from doing prioritization to mentoring teams to develop their own prioritization instincts and ownership.
Actionable Items:
- Facilitate team workshops to share business context regularly.
- Develop and document clear prioritization rules tailored to product and customer needs.
- Implement a Team Compass to empower teams in making consistent prioritization trade-offs.
- Conduct regular retrospectives focusing on prioritization decisions and outcomes.
- Encourage managers to adopt the role of mentor and coach rather than coordinator or "human filter."
- Promote transparency around priorities and involve stakeholders carefully to avoid overloading or politicizing priorities.
- The speaker shares a personal experience during company restructuring, where team leaders had to manage multiple teams instead of one.
- Initially felt empowered with more projects and teams.
- Encountered a bottleneck situation, becoming the sole decision-maker for prioritization, leading to delays and burnout.
- Problems arose when teams awaited directions or made random task choices due to lack of clear prioritization.
- Over-involvement in prioritization caused loss of ownership and creativity within teams.
- Being a single point of failure increased risk for the company and personal burnout.
Key Realizations:
- Good leadership means being present but not controlling every prioritization detail.
- Prioritization must be a continuous, integrated team practice, not solely manager-driven.
- Teams need context and understanding of business goals to make effective trade-offs.
- Information and decision-making should remain human-centered and accessible.
Solutions and Practices:
- Use prioritization frameworks as conversation starters (e.g., impact vs effort), not as rigid decision-makers.
- Encourage transparency and stakeholder involvement to clarify priorities.
- Implement first ranking selectively for urgent, high-pressure situations to bring clarity.
- Foster ongoing communication between development, sales, support, and product teams.
- Utilize tools like Team Compass (or Agile Compass) to guide teams in making prioritization decisions independently.
- Document prioritization rules clearly, specifying preferences with reasons ("We prefer X over Y because Z").
- Conduct post-mortems to learn from prioritization mistakes and refine decision-making.
- Recognize the limits of intuition—it’s valuable but hard to transfer; systems and heuristics help scale influence.
- Shift manager role from doing prioritization to mentoring teams to develop their own prioritization instincts and ownership.
Actionable Items:
- Facilitate team workshops to share business context regularly.
- Develop and document clear prioritization rules tailored to product and customer needs.
- Implement a Team Compass to empower teams in making consistent prioritization trade-offs.
- Conduct regular retrospectives focusing on prioritization decisions and outcomes.
- Encourage managers to adopt the role of mentor and coach rather than coordinator or "human filter."
- Promote transparency around priorities and involve stakeholders carefully to avoid overloading or politicizing priorities.
Manager as a Mentor, Not a Coordinator – Teaching Prioritization Instead of Micromanagement
16:40 - 17:10, 27th of May (Tuesday) 2025 / DEV ARCHITECTURE STAGE
In this talk, I’ll share how I learned to scale my impact as a manager by doing less, not more. Too many managers burn out by taking ownership of their team’s priorities, stifling both their own capacity and their team’s growth. It’s a recipe for disaster, especially when managing multiple teams. But there’s a better way: teaching your team how to prioritize on their own. By fostering autonomy and sound decision-making, you unlock faster decisions, better outcomes, and—bonus—you avoid manager burnout. Join me to discover how shifting from an “assistant” to a “mentor” mindset can transform your leadership and your team’s success.
LEVEL:
Basic
Advanced
Expert
TRACK:
Dev Managers
IT Leaders
TOPICS:
IT Management
