About 95 percent of programming managers had no management training before being tapped to manage. Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle, both former programmers, didn't either. About half of managers still haven't. Ron and Mickey were lucky enough to work for companies like Apple and Pixar that provided some training. But even then, little of it was specific to managing programmers, or to managing programming teams. It motivated years of weekend breakfasts during which they traded insights on the challenges they faced - and solutions they had used and seen - which led them to grasp they had independently both been collecting rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom both from their peers around the world as well as from the thought leaders of programming management. They had been sharing insights and best practices for a decade when they realized they wanted to share the best of what they had collected and learned - and wished they'd had when they started managing. That desire led them to write Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net (Addison Wesley) - that reviewers have repeatedly compared to The Mythical Man-Month, the classic on software development challenges. In this interactive session, we'll look at twelve best practices that make programming managers great - you'll take away twelve best practices that take most managers years to discover.

2013 Study of Product Team Performance Actuation Consulting conducts an annual global study of product team performance. This session will focus on the emergent trends and factors impacting product teams. The material will be presented jointly by Greg Geracie and Ron Lichty co-authors of this years study.