Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

by Rand Fishkin

On the great teams I’ve observed in which the manager did not possess technical skills, there was often a surprising benefit: the team members themselves upgraded one another’s skills, mentored one another, and more often, took greater responsibility for the output of the work. I suspect that’s because in teams with managers who possess their own strong technical skills, the work gets done their way, and the improvement in skills tends to be clustered around the managers’ specific strengths. It also strikes me that because of the reliance on these highly skilled managers, there’s less individual effort given by the team’s members to explore and expand on their own. This isn’t always the case—sometimes a great IC will make for a great people manager who encourages broader education from the team and who encourages dissent on how to do things rather than enforcing his own tried-and-true methods. But both my own lived experiences and the research suggest that people management and IC work are two fundamentally different things whose overlap is neither obvious nor consistent.