Forged Manager's Course Outline
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Welcome to the Forged Manager's Course. If we haven't met, my name is John Bloom. I love leadership and helping new leaders.
My mission is to assist software developers in making the switch to management. I believe that the skillset you have is not necessarily the skillset you need. It takes a lot of time to realign your thinking if you don't have help. That is why I have spent so much time trying to teach you what skills you can leverage and what skills you will need to develop quickly, so you can focus on the right things.
I have been planning this course for years. I have slowly been putting all of the pieces together until I was comfortable that it was a cohesive end-to-end process. As a developer, I love process and frameworks. What I felt was missing from the management world was a framework that could provide enough direction to be genuinely useful but wasn't too prescriptive that it would stifle personal creativity.
This is my attempt to create that framework. I have found that when followed, it gives you a defensible position to work on things that you find enjoyable. It gives you the freedom to manage your own schedule and tasks. It's not easy, and there are times when you have to be back in the weeds fixing issues, but more often than not, this course will help you create a job where you work on things you truly love.
This framework will also make you successful. The end goal is to create a scenario where you are forward-looking and strategic. People who do that tend to get promoted. It will constantly focus you on high-value work and will give you the freedom to work on it.
Okay, now that you know the goal, let's go over the outline. All of these sections will be a post or a series of posts for my paid members on Substack. New posts will come out every Thursday morning.
Overview and Mission
The first major section of the course is about why you might want to become a manager and how to make the transition. The sections are as follows:
Using This Course
In this section, I'll give tips and tricks for how to use this course.
Introduction to the MOST Framework
The MOST framework is central to how I think about things. It stands for Mission, Objectives, Strategy, and Tactics. These concepts are good for understanding work and for understanding life as well.
Mission
Your mission is the single thing you are currently focused on in life. If you have a mission, you don't need motivation. You will be compelled to act. I'll help you set your mission.
Objectives
If the mission is the "Why," then the objectives are the "What." What are you going to do to accomplish the mission?
Objectives are the big stepping stones to accomplishing your mission. If being a development manager is not an objective that will get you closer to your mission, exit the loop.
Strategies
Strategies answer the question "How?" If you have a good mission and a set of objectives that will get you there, then the strategies will be how you accomplish your objectives. There are millions of different strategies. Strategies are not unique to you; only your execution of them is. Strategies are what most books teach you and what this course will teach you.
Tactics
Tactics are skills. They are the tools you need to execute the strategy. They are the tools you use and your ability to become proficient with the tools. Tactics are important because they will make you efficient, but strategy will make you effective. Tactics complement strategy, but they don't replace it. You can be an amazing developer, but if you are working on the wrong things, you are still going to fail.
Should You Become a Manager?
In this section, I'll talk about the biggest struggles developers face in management but also why I think leadership is a superpower and how it can solve your problem-solving itch.
Getting into Management
In this section, I'll discuss what you can do as a developer to start making the move to the management role.
The In-Between Phase
Often, companies will move a new manager into a 50/50 position. This means half of your time is going to management and the other half to software development. This is an inevitable place to end up at since people who move to management are often top engineers, and the company can't afford to lose them as an individual contributor. I'll talk about how to navigate this particular problem.
Development Manager Hierarchy
The next major section gives you a framework for how to prioritize your time once you have become a manager. The Development Manager Hierarchy is my particular framework that will give you an idea of what you need to focus on first. It's based on the same concept as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The main tenants are as follows:
Personal Mindset
In this section, we will talk about how you need to think about your role. You have to be ready to show up every day with this mindset: own all of the problems, deflect all of the praise.
Cohesive Team
Your team is the foundation. In this section, we will talk about how to build and maintain a cohesive team that trusts each other and you.
Clear Objectives
Once your team is a smooth operating machine, you can start clarifying the work they are doing. The goal is to make sure your objectives are clear and concise.
Goal Attainment
Once you know what the goals are, it's time to track them. The goal is to set targets and manage expectations.
Healthy System
If your goal setting and attainment are a smooth operating machine, it's time to make sure you have monitoring on your system. If something fails, someone should know.
Solid Metrics
Once you are confident that failures will be noticed, it's time to make sure you are tracking your improvement and the improvement of your product.
Future Strategy
Finally, you have reached self-actualization as a manager. If you have built the foundation of all of the other steps, you can look up and start thinking strategically. You can look down the road and solve problems before they happen. The goal is to stay in this state for as long as possible before one of the lower states needs attention.
Development Manager Tactics
Finally the last section is tactics that will make you more efficient and effective as a manager. They include:
Dev Manager Hierarchy Reviews
I'll provide templates for how to evaluate yourself weekly, monthly, and quarterly to ensure that you are performing well at all stages of the hierarchy and creating a rock-solid foundation that your boss will be impressed with.
Email
As a developer, email is often not a problem, but once you become a manager, you need a whole new level of process. If you don't already have a process, I have a rock-solid one that I have used for years.
Calendar
Linked to email, calendars start to fill up once you become a manager. I'll walk you through some good calendar practices and how your mindset needs to shift from the creative calendar to the management calendar.
Meetings
Once you become a manager, it's very easy to get lulled into accepting dozens of meeting invitations. So often, we just say yes to everything. I'll teach you tricks for how to aggressively keep your meeting count down and drive more value than the meeting-filled calendars of your colleagues.
Wildcard
The end of this course is likely to be months away. I hope that by that point, I'm receiving great feedback on what people are struggling with. I'm leaving the window open for more good things to come.
Conclusion
Once we have made it this far I think we will have accomplished a lot together. I intend to take all of these articles and make them available to you as a single pdf and eventually a video course. I am intending to make this article available to my free members. If these topics interest you feel free to join my paid subscription and come along for the ride. If not I will be posting lots of good content to my free subscription as well.
If you liked this, consider subscribing to my Substack. I publish an article about software engineering and software engineering management every Tuesday. If you want even more, consider joining my paid content where I am writing a course in real time about making the jump from developer to manager.