What does a Development Manager Do All Day?

When this role is first discussed, many will ask “what does a Development Manager do all day”. The thinking here is that the traditional role of management has been to assign work to people and hold them accountable for that work. If they are not doing this, what does the Development Manager do? The reality is that if you think about what a manager should be doing (career development, solving problems, working with people toward results, etc) then the reality is that we have not been doing a “complete” job as a Manager.

From the responsibilities and the role it is clear there is a lot to do. One big change is that the role of the Development Manager is an active role where they are out with the people they are managing, seeing the work, and working to solve problems. To give you an idea of the role, let’s work some basics assuming the Development Manager has 20 people she is working with.

If we look at a 2 week period (or 80 hours), for a normal week time could be allocated as follows:

Activity	Hours	Comments
One-on-one meeting	20	20 people, 1 hour each
Attend program meetings	10	4 x SoS, 2 x PO Sync plus preparation and follow-up
Spot attend Team Dailies, Planning, Demos	10	10 meetings of 60 minutes each
Champion Community of Practice	4	1 hour meeting with 3 hours prep and followup
Development Managers Community of Practice	1	Collaboration and improvement
Buffer per normal agile planning (eg email, meeting, etc)	20	25% of capacity
Total:	65	Every 2 weeks

This leaves 15 hours in the two weeks, or 7.5 hours per week, for all the other responsibilities.