Mastering the Complex World of Software Management: Increasing Impact and Improving Performance for Software Managers

You were a happy coder, then the opportunity came to lead a team. Unfamiliar assignments come without warning, team members need care and attention, and then the organization demands that you take on roles you hadn’t prepared for and work with people whom you have no idea what they do. It’s a struggle to keep up and often feels like thrashing rather than success. 

And yet, you are the lynchpin. Software Managers are responsible for critical product delivery and information processing in the largest and most impactful global companies and across nearly every industry and public sector. Some of the fundamentals like project management and team leadership have been well documented but the world keeps getting more complicated. 

This book reveals the breadth of domains that a Software Manager will encounter as they progress from competent contributor to tech lead to manager to increasing levels of responsibility. Even experienced managers will find helpful new perspectives and insights. You will be challenged to think more deeply about the people you may manage, the processes of developing products so complex that no individual can keep it all in their head, and the often-mysterious organizational behaviors surrounding you.

Tech companies don't have to throw good practitioners into hard management positions with no training and compound the error as people advance in their management careers; it has just been our habit. We can do better. Mastering the Complex World of Software Management provides realistic scope, attacks the nitty-gritty realities, and challenges the reader to think about their situation so they can solve the myriad technical, process, organizational, and business challenges coming their way.

What You Will Learn

• Master the fundamentals of managing technology teams
• See how operating teams navigate themselves within a larger organization    
• Understand and work around the landmines in software development

Who This Book is For

Software developers who are considering a management path for their career; senior tech leads that are responsible for much of a software team's operation; software development managers that want to improve their capabilities in order to take on more responsibilities and earn a promotion.

David Asher brings an unusual perspective to software management based on his varied career as a product management leader, inventor, entrepreneur, systems analyst, and coder. Some of his roles were at well-known names like Amazon, Bose, Iron Mountain, Dialogic, Banyan Systems, and Grumman, while others were at smaller companies and startups. His software experience spans from cloud to mobile apps to firmware, and his backgrounds in physics, signal processing, sensors, and electronics further broaden his perspectives from pure software to complex real-time systems. Asher developed a career pattern as an inside entrepreneur, over and over initiating and leading startup programs within companies that would lead to disruptive new products. He has authored multiple patents, published several mobile apps, and written the open-source software electron-firebase. He earned an MBA from the University of New Hampshire, MS Electrical Engineering from SUNY Stony Brook, and BS in Physics and Computer Science from SUNY Albany. In his volunteer life, he is on the Board of Directors for a non-profit org where he had served as VP and President, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the IT Management and Leadership (ITML) Institute.

Asher's career took an unusual twist - changing course from product management to rediscovering engineering leadership and the joys of building teams that build stuff. It is with all these experiences that he is now giving back to the community of software managers and challenging them to raise the bar on their leadership of technology development and people.