Who Accepts Your Team’s Academy Awards?

I was listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast the other night. Yeah, I wasn’t kidding. I’m really trying to figure out how to do this stuff. Anyway, it was an episode with “User Stories” in the title, so I was intrigued. What I actually thought to myself was, “I’m a lot more inclined to hear stories about passive income than about Scrum, but this could be interesting!” And, it actually was interesting. I mean that earnestly. The episode was about Pat commissioning an IOS app for his podcast, so anyone making a living in our industry would be somewhat intrigued.

The episode started, and I listened. Admittedly, beyond Pat, I don’t exactly know who the players are, but I can tell you what I inferred as I was jogging (I frequently listen to podcasts when I jog). The interview started, and Pat was talking to someone that seemed to have a project-manager-y role. Pat asked about the app, and the guest talked about communication, interactions, and the concepts of “user story” and “product backlog.” He didn’t actually label this process Scrum until much, much later in the interview, and I get that – he’s talking to a huge audience of potential clients, so it’s a lot more compelling to describe Scrum as if it were something he thought of than it is to say, “oh yeah, we do Scrum – go google it!”

I don’t begrudge him that in the slightest. It’s a savvy approach. But it did strike me as interesting that this conversation about an app started with and centered around communication and planning. The technical decisions, data, and general nuts and bolts were all saved for later, delegated to a programmer underling, and framed as details that were definitely less relevant. In the development of this app, the important thing was the project manager, who he talked to, and when he talked to them. The development of the app was a distant second.

My reaction to this, as I jogged, was sad familiarity. I didn’t think, “how dare that project manager steal the show!” I thought, “oh, naturally, that’s a project manager stealing the show – that’s more or less their job. Developer code, not know talk human. Project manager harness, make use developer, real brains operation!”

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The Tech Lead Role: Lessons from Ancient Rome

 

Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cassius walk into a bar, and the bartender asks them what they’ll have. “3 beers!” Caesar proclaims. “2 beers,” whispers Cassius.

 

Because I’m not a historian, I have the luxury of making spurious historical arguments that suit my purpose. I can even bring in Star Wars if I want to. For those of you only passingly familiar with the story of Caesar, he was the pivotal, popular, and controversial figure around which the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. He was also the obvious inspiration for the scene in which Chancellor Palpatine becomes Emperor Palpatine, causing Padme to remark, “so this is how liberty dies… with thunderous applause.” Caesar was a popular and extraordinary general that imposed his will on the increasingly ineffectual Roman Republic, essentially replacing it with a more unified and centralized imperial government. That is, until his friends in the bar assassinated him in the name of “liberty.”

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