Through the course of their careers, tech leaders will likely oversee dozens of projects and face a variety of hurdles. Along the way, they learn smart strategies and essential practices that make them more effective leaders.
Whether it’s a lesson learned during a particularly challenging project (or satisfying success) or the result of accumulated understanding that comes with years of experience, most tech leaders can pinpoint one essential best practice that they’ve carried forward through their careers and leverage in every new project. Here, 16 members of Forbes Technology Council each share one particularly memorable and influential lesson that still guides them today.
1. Learn How To Give 100% Focus
I was a new leader of a dev team tasked with fixing a revenue loss problem created by an outsourced team’s requirement miss. We estimated it would take three months; leadership said, “You’ve got 30 days.” My prerequisites—which included assembling the right team, following the sun with team members located in the U.S. and India, creating iterative workstreams and holding two-a-day stand-ups—required 100% focus. We fixed the issue and recovered our past losses (totaling $12 million) in 27 days. – Windy Nicholson, Salesforce
2. Look For The Lessons In Challenges
Face reality and deal with it. Seek the data to create a deeper understanding of the pain and challenge you faced, and reflect and realize that pain and challenges are a way of improving one’s ability to succeed. By synthesizing what you have learned, you can often evolve and improve to face coming challenges and, simply put, become stronger. – Jamie Dixon, ELLA Digital Ltd.
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3. Do Your Homework Thoroughly Before Starting A Project
One lesson I learned from a challenging development project is the importance of thorough estimations and risk assessment. The takeaway is that being too optimistic can lead to overlooking key aspects of a project, resulting in unrealistic expectations. Ensure detailed planning, accurate time and resource estimations, and proper identification and mitigation of risks to achieve better outcomes. – Anton Abyzov, Softgreat
4. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
Aim for the moon, but plan in small iterations. The most successful projects I’ve been involved in shared one common approach: Iterate, iterate, iterate. Start with a small feature delivery, test it in the market, get feedback from clients, apply your learnings and then plan the next iteration. – Simana Paul, SumUp
5. Prioritize Effective Communication And Collaboration
My most challenging development project was building an e-commerce website with a content management system in place. This project had extremely tight deadlines, and multiple teams were involved. I learned that, in order to collaborate effectively, it’s important to prioritize communication between teams, build a common platform to share progress and challenges and seek timely feedback to address issues. – Namrata Sengupta, Stellar Data Recovery Inc. dba BitRaser
6. Embrace Exploration And Discovery
Often, we think we need everything ready to go as we start a project, but what really leads to innovation is exploration and discovery along the way. Each time we work with a new company, we end up developing new solutions, and this leads to a wealth of know-how within the company. It’s one of our most valuable assets as we move into a world where innovation is not an option, but a must. – Ozgur Ulku, Litum Technologies
7. Know That Team Success Is Built On Communication And Transparency
Although we work with technology, communication and transparency are key to the team’s success. Encouraging honest feedback, giving a voice to everyone on the team, aligning with stakeholders and showing appreciation when it is due all help motivate team members to work together toward a common goal. – Una Verhoeven, Valtech
8. Disciplined Leadership Is Key
In my 27-year career, I have worked on large government and enterprise projects. They all had prime contractors who also had a number of subcontractors working on the project. The prime contractors who ran a disciplined project management office and did a good job of managing all the subcontractors are the ones that I have seen consistently deliver on time and within budget for the client. Leadership is key. – Daniel Sloan, Future Tech
9. Don’t Pinch Pennies When It Comes To Top Talent
When hiring top talent, you really do get what you pay for! It is very easy to fall into the trap of trying to “save money,” but losing productivity in the background means those “savings” aren’t really worth it at all. Sometimes hiring one very strong player who is at a higher salary is significantly more cost-effective and beneficial to a business than hiring two mediocre players at mid-range salaries. – Hebron Sher, Zevo Corp
10. Build An ‘Antifragile’ Culture
When the pandemic started, we were working on a project to automate a process within a lab. But once the pandemic began, we had to cancel the project, even though a lot of modules had already been written by the team. The beauty is that we were able to create two systems from these modules, and one of them did 100,000 daily antigen tests. After a while, we realized the importance of having an “antifragile” culture. – Mouhamad Kawas, Kuality AI
11. Focus On Human Connections
Build, invest in and nurture business relationships. Human beings, by design, thrive on being relationally connected. Focusing on pure outcomes and actions alone while neglecting relationships with people may be a winning strategy in the short run, but it often turns out to be to the detriment of a person in the long run. Focus on true, human connections. – Charles Bankston, NiSource, Inc.
12. Never Compromise On Proven Processes
One of our clients had an extremely tight deadline for a mission-critical product. We agreed to build the product only if we could follow our processes and not skip any steps. In an early brainstorming session, the CEO of the client company asked how the session was going to help get his product shipped. Near the end of the session, a subject matter expert offered an insight that changed the entire product workflow. The lesson? Never compromise your process; only evolve it. – Matthew Cloutier, Sticky Strategy
13. Always Build An MVP For Prospect Review
Bringing an idea to life in the form of a venture is one of the hardest things I’ve accomplished. And as a third-time entrepreneur, I’ve learned one thing: Always build an MVP or first version of your product, and pitch it to real-world prospects to determine its potential for success. You’ll save an incredible amount of time through this process and gather valuable feedback that will help you with your final build. – Laxman Papineni, Outplay
14. Don’t Build A Product Without Stakeholder Buy-In
Product development is not just about defining a set of requirements and delivering the product (read “code”) per spec. Implementing this kind of approach—even with the right project management in place—can fail if your stakeholders have not bought into the project, whether that’s your clients, your client-facing team, implementation and delivery, or management. – Anila Siraj
15. Remember Linus’ Law
For me, an essential lesson has been that, as Linus’ Law says, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” My most challenging project was building a workalike of the BAMTech/MLB livestream video serving stack for NASA during the Mars Curiosity Rover launch. I knew a lot, but through socializing the exact problem and leveraging my network of incredible cloud engineers, all the little nits and impediments melted away. – Miles Ward, SADA
16. Define Success, But Be Willing To Fail Along The Way
I once solved a customer retention problem by identifying key signals that indicated positive or negative changes. We experimented in two-week sprints to quickly build new experiences and see what moved the needle. It took eight tries, but the impact was massive. Lesson learned: To move fast, be willing to fail, don’t get too attached to any solution and know what success looks like. – Darren Guarnaccia, Uniform DXCP