I am 100-percent certain that on the day they asked me to manage at Minitab, they did not tell me I would have to do so much process work. They didn’t clearly articulate that as a manager, I’d spend a considerable part of my time discussing how we develop software rather than actually developing software. Perhaps I should have known. A better engineer probably would have known. But me? Nope, I didn’t see it coming.

Dave Nelson (the head of product development at Minitab) may have told me that I wouldn’t have as much time to test things myself, because managing does take a considerable amount of time. I vaguely recall a story about him having to come to grips with not being able to code as much after he became a manager. But he didn’t mention process. He definitely didn’t mention process. And quite frankly, I assumed he was lying about the rest of it.

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