Assessing Your Own Experience

• What are your new responsibilities now that you’re the manager of a team? What tasks have you stopped doing or handed off to someone else in order to make time for these new responsibilities?
• How well do you feel you know the day-to-day challenges of writing, deploying, and supporting code on your team?
• How often does your team mark work as completed?
• When was the last time you wrote a feature, debugged a problem, or paired with a member of your team on some code he or she was struggling with?
• Are there one or two team members who cause the bulk of negativity on the team? What is your plan for getting rid of the problem moving forward?
• Do your team members seem engaged with one another? Do they smile in meetings? Make jokes in chat? Get coffee or lunch together? When was the last time you all sat down together without talking about work?
• How does your team make decisions? Do you have a process for assigning decision-making responsibility? What decisions do you hold yourself responsible for making?
• When was the last time you reviewed a completed project to see if it had achieved its goals?
• How well does your team understand why they are working on the projects they are working on?
• When was the last time you cut scope on a project? What did you use to determine which pieces to cut?