In my last blog post, I wrote about the side effects of manager as Product Owner. In it, I talked about how I believe these roles should be filled by different people. So if the manager isn’t directing the work, what’s s/he doing? How does a manager help his/her people when they’re distributed across multiple teams? The Scrum Guide is silent on the topic, and although I offered up some of my own opinions in Managers in an Agile Shop, I didn’t offer much practical advice. Let’s fix that. Today, I’ll bias my advice toward the actionable, and I think it all can summarized in these wise words by Ed Catmull:
It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.