2 responses on “Steve Zehngut – How to Hire and Manage a Developer”

1. Scott Ellis
   May 28, 2010 at 2:29 pm | Reply

   Steve, First off Excellent presentation! While I’ve been ramping down my services work in favor of product based development, as a developer and (like you) now, primarily a business person (who still happens to do some dev) for much of my career, you addressed a lot of good points that need to be understood when hiring someone for a project.

   In my mind there are two things that simply can’t be emphasized enough:

   1) You can’t plan enough and it should take up the bulk of your time in a project. Easily > 50%
   2) The hiring party needs to own the project. It’s not to say that the developer/shop that gets hired shouldn’t be driving the project but the hiring parties need to be very involved in the process and absolutely must make ample time to work with the developer as per #1.

   Developers also need to understand that they have a responsibility to educate their clients, share their knowledge and make sure they actually understand what they are asking for.

   The last thing, and this is a big one I emphasize with all of my clients, is that YOU (the hiring party) own and are responsible for the content. You might get help if you hire a firm with copywriters, but if you are working with a freelance developer (most, no all) they may not have the skills, industry knowledge or bandwidth to also write your content. I know that seems like common sense but I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve had that think of their site and their content as the same thing (they’re not).

   I’m sure we could discuss this topic for days but thank for making a great presentation on the topic, I’ll be sure to recommend this video to a lot of people.

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• Steve Zehngut
  May 28, 2010 at 9:59 pm | Reply

  Scott-

  Thanks for the kudos! I have lived in this world for 15+ years now and I have watched the same patterns emerge over and over.

  You make an excellent point that developers have a responsibility to educate their clients. Client education is a critical to setting expectations. Educated clients make for much smoother projects.

  If you are interested, I wrote a 4 part series on our site after giving this session:

  http://zeek.com/how-to-speak-geek-part-1-interviewing-your-potential-developer/
  http://zeek.com/how-to-speak-geek-part-2-planning-project-management/
  http://zeek.com/how-to-speak-geek-part-3-version-control/
  http://zeek.com/how-to-speak-geek-part-4-bug-reporting/

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