What is A Software Development Manager? Career Path and Overview

Design thinking means that the product manager knows how to research and plan accordingly, spotting business opportunities based on data collection and knowledge base. Project managers are often dedicated to their team and build a strong bond. They have to make sure that the team delivers on schedule and fulfills the project expectations. They also are in charge of cheerleading the team by encouraging people to meet goals and taking care of their needs. Proven track record of delivering complex software solutions to required timelines with high quality results.

A project manager is usually in charge of a team, reviews their work daily, and focuses on details and achieving project goals. Product managers have similar responsibilities, but they are more product-focused, jumping from one team to another and following the whole process with a more general view. There is usually only one CTO in charge of the whole technological area in a company. On the other hand, a company might have many tech leads according to their number of separate development teams. There is the case of the small business or startup, where CTO, tech lead, lead developer, and even maybe the whole dev team is a single person. Plus, software architects should understand the development workflow and processes and communicate them to others.

Manager, Software Development

The average Software Development Manager salary in the United States is $150,220 as of December 27, 2022, but the range typically falls between $136,470 and $167,290. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession. With more online, real-time compensation data than any other website, Salary.com helps you determine your exact pay target. These certifications may provide you with a reference from an established Software Engineering Manager that you have the required knowledge and experience. All four of our certifications share a bank of nearly 300 categorized questions. Questions are randomly selected from specified categories to get the correct mix of questions for each certification level.

They both need people skills, a bird’s eye view, and technological expertise. Each role takes a different combination and scope of similar skills, which can be shaped according to the team and organizational culture. Quality assurance leaders are senior quality specialists that manage a dedicated team of testers to assure the best results in a software development project.

How Much Work Experience Is Required?

On the other hand, QA leaders need to define testing standards and strategies. Defining quality standards and metrics for the current project or product is a must for any project to succeed. That can be complemented by creating a list of milestones and checkpoints and setting measurable criteria to check the quality at pace. No plan survives contact with the enemy, but not having a plan is a no-go.

If you’re interested in becoming a software development manager, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We’ve determined that 71.3% of software development managers have a bachelor’s degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 21.1% of software development managers have master’s degrees. Even though most software development managers have a college degree, it’s impossible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.

Chief Technology Officer

If a product fails, does it mean the team involved wasted their time? Thousands of people advanced their careers and became senior engineers while developing Windows Phone. That growth experience cannot be discounted just because the product they created doesn’t exist anymore. This helps engineers remain focused on what matters from a business perspective.

Those software development managers who do attend college, typically earn either a computer science degree or a electrical engineering degree. Less commonly earned degrees for software development managers include a business degree or a computer engineering degree. Software development managers are responsible for leading a team to design, troubleshoot, and optimize software programs. Software development managers work to develop short- and long-term strategies for technology development to manage scalable software products. Software development managers make $135,000 a year, on average ($65.15 an hour). The range in pay for software developers is between $102,000 to $179,000 a year.

The thing is, you do not want every team member to be the same because a variety of skills and aptitudes are needed. We will then review some of the most common topics when building a software development team, so you get one according to your needs. With the time they get by doing fewer tests, QA leaders focus on test planning, bird’s eye reviews, and creating long-term strategies. At the same time, leaders need to take care of their team by helping them grow, learn, and take on challenging tasks and projects. In many cases, team lead and tech lead overlap depending on their expertise and the number of responsibilities they can manage.

Director of Software Development

The software manager must ensure that all deliverables are met in a given timeline. However, learning how to communicate and evangelize to the team, to management, and to the rest of the organization can help you find your way to the development manager role. When using Scrum, each iteration should take less than the previous one, as you are building up from existing foundations. Thanks to having an MVP, adding new features and correcting issues is way easier, and the development team is not constantly facing a white page block.

Each member plays a huge part in the project, but the manager steers the wheel to move forward. In addition, software development managers have to coordinate with all parties involved in the project. Identifying the core features and requirements is necessary to come up with the right method and system of development. More often than not, software development managers also need to be experts on the product.

If you are thinking of becoming a Software Development Manager or planning the next step in your career, find details about the role, the career path and salary trajectory of a Software Development Manager. The national average salary for a Software Development Manager is $147,336 per year in United States. Filter by location to see a Software Development Manager salaries in your area. Salaries estimates are based on 4073 salaries submitted anonymously to Glassdoor by a Software Development Manager employees. Because of our open-source culture, we wanted to share what we have learned along the way with this ever-updating ultimate guide. Sinek shows that the greatest leaders in the world all think, act, and communicate in similar ways.

When developing a product, they have to establish processes, design the roadmap, and make business decisions. If you Google “product manager”, you will often find it referred to as the product CEO, since they are in charge of the life cycle of a product from beginning to end. Even if product managers are, in fact, managers overlooking a project, this definition might have limitations. CTOs are the ones that will promote the company’s technological evolution and create the best environment for the company to be competitive. To achieve this, they often have to bring business and technology strategies together, making the role essential in any big-enough enterprise.

What’s the Development Manager role?

Software Development Managers in America make an average salary of $134,747 per year or $65 per hour. The top 10 percent makes over $180,000 per year, while the bottom 10 percent under $100,000 per year. Companies that use a plethora of third-party apps or desktops, servers, or infrastructure are likely to have a CIO. Companies that create software-as-a-service solutions usually have a CTO.

• That includes analyzing status reports from team managers and creating and defining risk contingencies and plans to send feedback from management to development and vice versa.
• Employers favor a background of several years as a software developer for most software development manager openings.
• Bachelor’s degrees are generally required for management positions in software development.
• What I teach you here can save you $10,000’s or $100,000’s when leading an engaged Software Engineering team – and hours and hours of research, trial and error.
• You might think of this difference in the same way as a team lead or tech lead differs from a full-stack developer.
• Many people, especially students or even junior engineers, often think that managers are supposed to give orders.
• Software development managers play a crucial role in the success of a development project.

The most common race/ethnicity among software development managers is White, which makes up 71.1% of all software development managers. Among software development managers, 14.9% of them are women, while 85.1% are men. Fortunately, the age of telecommuting and remote work is finally here. Businesses now have the option to hire remote software development managers.

Benefits of a Software Development Manager

It all feeds back to the Progress vision for application development and infrastructure software, which we will now manage through digitally encoded policies and controls. If we started that journey with information management at the heart of the software kernel, then we need to go one cloud team tier deeper and add metadata management. To write an effective manager, software development job description, begin by listing detailed duties, responsibilities and expectations. We have included manager, software development job description templates that you can modify and use.

Get notified about new Software Development Manager jobs in United States. The top paying company in Real Estate for Software Development Manager is Zillow. Many programmers argue that they don’t care about “that sort of thing” and can actually manage without a graphical user interface , but that’s not the case for most users. Even if that is the case, a good UI and UX are necessary for product success. If you are looking for some principles, you can find the twelve principles of agile software on the manifesto. Because of its versatility, it is hard to put agile development into words, but it is not necessary; the creators have already done it in 68 words on their manifesto.

About the Company

Software development also needs someone to put out fires and maintain their temple in a crisis. When we discussed how to find a dream job in the tech industry, we talked about how managers play a crucial role in an engineer’s career. Having a bad manager can have catastrophic consequences, especially in companies where engineers’ growth directly depends on their manager’s actions. Measure your manager using the areas above, and if possible, look for a manager that is clearly invested in people, that takes pride in helping their team grow. Project Management, 4%Incorporated business case justification for projects and delivered results using structured project management techniques and IEEE standards for software development.

If you are considering implementing agile methodology in your organization, the benefits are definitely worth considering. Both roles are crucial and they are meant to deliver maximum performance in terms of productivity, coordination, and customer happiness. Training sales representatives with technical knowledge can be a lifesaver. That is why establishing a learning culture and open communication between departments is the go-to for any software development business. Software development teams can work side by side with Design, Marketing, HR, and Sales to maximize productivity, divide labor, and increase the business’s chance of success. We have talked before about multidisciplinary teams; this is going one step further.

As you can see, the creators of the agile software development manifesto cherished agility, versatility, and flexibility over a definitive way of developing software. Thanks to having a set of guidelines to follow, anyone can apply the concepts as they see fit for their company or project. I know that oftentimes decision makers want a silver bullet, a technique that will guarantee triumph and success, but there are no panaceas or universal recipes in business or software development. As with other leadership positions, team leads need good communication skills for hiring, training, and reviewing performance. These HR tasks need solid people skills and are the basis for building team trust.

You might think of this difference in the same way as a team lead or tech lead differs from a full-stack developer. With the responsibility of management, QA leaders can’t be micromanaging each test and conducting every review. They keep the hardest part for themselves and rely on their team members for the bulk of tests. At times, full-stack developers become non-stop multitaskers incapable of focusing on a single task. As technology advances and the amount of tools grows, full-stack developers’ positions are increasingly complex.