Cue the Psycho music. Throw in a Wilhelm scream. Run for your lives!!!  To some alpha developers, the mere thought of a software development manager coding is worse than 12 hours of fingernails on a chalkboard. And scarier than a night in the Bates Motel.

Yeah, I get that. But wait.

There are some valid, and practical reasons for a software development manager to also take a few story points  in a sprint now and then. Here are five.

1. Keeps your skills sharp

Today’s development languages, technologies, tools, and environments evolve with ever quickening pace.

The experience you had as a coder 10 years ago is aging faster than the milk left out on the counter last night.

Taking a few story points now and then forces to you learn and keep up with tech, staying relevant in your field and your own product and environment. It also allows you to communicate with better understanding and at a deeper level with your development team.

2. Refreshes your familiarity with  development environment

But doing a development turn now and then you keep fresh in your mind the nuances of your companies particular development environment. And the pain or bliss it causes your team.

This knowledge can also improve your on-boarding process and make you more relevant in discussions when it comes time to migrate to new elements in your environment.

3. Deepens your product knowledge

By actually doing development on the products you manage, you will be far more knowledgable and effective in your communication to customers and superiors. You will understand the context of defects and issues that come up more thoroughly. You will be able to communicate with your team at a higher bandwidth during feature design or sprint planning.

4. Coverage for vacation, sickness, and emergencies

Sometimes you will find yourself in a pinch.

Your key developer is out, camping in the remotest parts of the Colorado mountains and completely off the grid for 2 weeks. The other guys are slammed and a defect found in his code needs to be addressed and pushed to production in 2 days.

If you have been keeping your skills sharp and doing your turns, you can step in and cover this situation in most cases. I know I have.

5. Respect of your team

If you can still take a ticket or two now and then, you will also silently earn greater respect from your team. They will believe you are in the foxhole with them. Your questions to them will be more on point and from an orientation of better understanding.

Conclusion

There is an influence from the professional management ranks that anyone with the requisite management training and skills can manage software development without the pre-requisite of coding experience. I have worked with PM’s who were good enough to pull that off. However, the PM’s who had actual development chops were far more effective in my experience.

So scare your team to death and sign up for a few story points in the next sprint.  In the long run, I believe you will be a more effective software development manager for it.