How to Build a Self-Managing Team That Ships Code

Fifteen years ago I founded my first company, and even now I hardly manage. I suspect few can do this. At my company AngelList, we need a self‑managing team that produces code.

Our approach is as follows.

Keep the team small. Everyone works; there is no conductor. Absolutely no middle management; all business expansion is done via APIs.

Outsource all non‑core work. Restrain the urge to earn the last penny; the boss also does customer‑service work.

Choose to work on features you enjoy, then submit. It is better than ordering people to write things they cannot.

No tasks longer than a week. You must submit code to production each week – at worst every two weeks. If you’re new, just figure out something to submit.

Pair management. Promise on internal Yammer what you will complete in the next week. Deliver code, otherwise you publicly break your promise (next‑week delivery).

Each project has only one owner. Others can help, but only one person is responsible.

If someone cannot produce, consider letting them go; our environment may not suit them. They should find a place where they can thrive.

This is not perfect. We develop many features, many of which are not fully formed, and the product is complex. It is hard to integrate non‑engineering people—they struggle to add value.

The important thing is, we produce code.

Original source: https://nav.al/build-a-team-that-ships

Reference reading:

What benefits can HTTP/3 bring to applications? Latest evaluation data

How to handle magic numbers in code

mini‑redis: a minimal Redis implementation in Rust

When you don’t understand a technology, how to interview engineers?

What does an ideal DevOps process look like? See Slack’s code deployment

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