Managing Code vs Managing People – Story of Software S02E23

Igor Bakman, CTO at ViViRA Health Lab, joins us to discuss the different approaches and mindsets involved in managing code vs people.

 

The Guest: Igor Bakman, CTO at ViViRA Health Lab

Igor Bakman, CTO at ViViRA Health Lab, a Berlin-based company providing personalised therapeutic training for patients with musculoskeletal pain. Igor joins the podcast to discuss his career journey from software engineer to CTO, and his passion for building successful teams and innovative products. 

 

The Ins and Outs of People Management

After our talk with Igor, it is clear that effective people management and code management have fundamental differences, and require different sets of skills. Successful people management in tech teams requires trusting your team, allowing them to come up with solutions, and not being possessive of the code or the work involved. 

So, what should leaders who started out as part of the development team do in order to avoid micromanagement and enable success for everyone?

Some of the topics covered include:

  • The route from developer to CTO
  • The differences between managing code and people
  • The mindset needed to be a good leader
  • The common mistakes involved in scaling teams

 

 

When you think about the differences between managing code vs people; what are the key differences in terms of skill sets you need to utilize?

“So when managing code; you need to be technical, and have strong technical skills. With managing people, I would say, first of all, you don’t manage people, you lead people because no one really needs to be managed. You manage code and you manage complexities, but not people. With leading people, you need a much much bigger set of skills to try to accommodate yourself to the situation that you’re presented with, and you will be presented with a huge variety of situations. Whereas, code is code. Code is not that easy, but it’s not extremely complex.”

 

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