Ask HN: IT Directors and VP's – how do you manage your time and projects?

More meetings seems like a bad cliché, but it's really the most impactful activity.

Meetings with customers (internal and external). They need to trust that you: a) understand their problems b) will commit to a service level agreement c) will convey the needs to your team

Meetings with team. 1:1 with each member at least once every 2 weeks.

Make sure to understand their personal situation. SO's name, kids, anything going on that might risk churn.

Make sure they are aligned with customers needs. Empower them to meet with customers directly and form their own solutions.

Follow-up on their concerns and "surprise" them with actions that show you were really listening.

Pipeline Always be recruiting, refining job descriptions, interviewing, and hiring.

Technical Strategy It's the thing technologists love most. But at Sr Management level you're empowering teams to choose frameworks/languages, building alignment, and helping them make decisions to move forward.

Note that I don't mention politics in any of the above. If you gain the trust of customers and employees in 1:1 meetings above, this should preemptively mitigate politics.

Here's a lens I use to think about my job that might make sense to someone with an engineering background:

- I'm in charge of architecting and building the team. the team is a system, of people and processes

- the team has various functional and nonfunctional requirements which i product manage

- I surface how the team works in general to our stakeholders, and our team strategy mainly deals with adjusting our "interface" and performance

- I also surface our team's current plan and how we're tracking, to the appropriate stakeholders, to give them context if we want to adjust how the "system" works

- I don't do any tasks other than those that relate to the above

- I don't try to heroically post-process or supplement the machine's performance through my personal efforts unless it's just really high leverage in that situation. (would have to be live or die almost, otherwise not worth it in the long run). I spend my efforts on adjusting the characteristics of the machine.

> I see a lot of people get promoted and keep doing their old job, the one that they were so good at it and came so naturally.

This tendency is very common, and it results in the Peter principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Would you classify someone like Linus Torvalds as a manager and an individual contributor? I see a lot of obsession with pigeonholing and defining roles with zero degrees of freedom. "A manager needs to stop doing ____ and needs to start doing ___". Who's making these definitions? I know plenty of small business owners who are quite successful at wearing both hats. I personally don't have a problem if someone out there decided that in order to be an effective leader they have to abandon their previous responsibilities entirely, but I don't see how that becomes a universal rule. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't make it right and no longer worth looking at.

List for mobile:

> Treat everyone else like you want to be treated. No "talking down".

> Got Business Requirements? Are they any good? That may be your problem.

> Same thing for Technical Specifications.

> Same thing for Test Plans.

> Is everyone working on their most important thing? Why not?

> Will it affect the annual report? Yes? It's an issue. No? It's a detail.

> Keep the process that's needed. It helps.

> Ditch the process that's not needed. It hurts.

> Go with your gut. That's what got you here.

> If it needs changed, change it. If you don't, it'll change itself some other way. > Correlation != Causation.

> Know the Critical Path.

> Keep your finger on the pulse of everything you can.

> Programmers produce. Everyone else must support them. (Never forget this!)

> If it's not written down, it's not.

> Relax and have fun. Can't? Find another career.