This blog was originally published on my football coaching blog, but I decided to cross-post it as many of its points come from, or apply to, the professional management world as well as the football coaching world.

As I reach the end of my 3rd season as a community coach, I can happily look back at the many dozens of matches and training sessions that we went through as a team. So many positives of course, and the usual hiccups.

But also quite a few thoughts about the styles of management I have come across (including my own!), and what it means to make young football players happy. So see below…

Over time, anybody involved in recruitment develops a few favorite interview questions. Here is one of mine, which I use regardless of the role I’m interviewing for - be it developer, architect, scrum master, systems engineer, team lead or else.

Leading a startup’s tech or product team is full of challenges. The amount of uncertainty can be overwhelming: what will happen next month, next year, who will I need to hire, what are we going to build?

Here I will cover a pattern I have seen with Product teams in startups: how they grow and how they share their responsibilities over time.

I have had the chance to work on the Product and Technical team structure of several tech businesses. One particular exercise I found very simple yet useful: to draw up a detailed list of the responsibilities of the Product team.

Instead of your traditional org chart, imagine having two distinct charts, one focusing on management lines while the other focuses on teams. What would it look like? And why would this be better?

Startups typically need to raise funds at several stages throughout their growth. A successful round of fundraising can secure the startup’s future while a failed round can have devastating effects. Yet as a CTO or technical lead, it’s easy to assume that fundraising is not part of your role.

I took part in multiple rounds of fundraising as CTO at Brandwatch, and investigated several startups as investment or acquisition opportunities - effectively sitting on both sides of the fundraising table. Here is an brief of what I came to expect of the fundraising process - how it typically works and a few lessons learnt along the way.

One-on-ones are regular meetings between an employee and his/her line manager. They are possibly the most important tool that managers have to do their work - a time-tested technique that Google found to be a key habit of effective managers.