Managing A Software Development Team You Now Own

You did not buy a codebase. You bought a company whose enterprise value is now partly hostage to a team you did not hire and cannot yet read. If you are a deal partner underwriting the thesis, an operating partner tasked with the first hundred days, or the CEO or CTO of a portfolio company inheriting an engineering group, the question in front of you is not how to write cleaner tickets. It is whether this team accelerates the value you paid for or quietly erodes it. This piece keeps the craft intact and reframes it around the decision you actually have to make.

Prior to launching my own web development agencies over 10 years ago, I’ve jumped between the role of a senior developer and a manager multiple times – including leading and managing a software development team role.

My first stunt in management was back in 2007. We were building a Java-based distributed software for a telecom group operating in multiple countries. I spent a year and a half with the company as a developer before joining the project along with our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and a couple of other developers.

The CTO and I spent several months working closely together on the initial architecture and some of the intermediate layers. It was fairly new technology so we had an opportunity to dive deep into technology that still lacked some basic libraries and web components. Spending evenings at the office debugging core code and building proof of concept solutions was certainly exciting – and enlightening in many ways.

A couple of new team members joined and I was involved in their onboarding. Just a few weeks later I got myself into being a development team manager until a very senior developer with a Ph.D. in mathematics joined the team and got busy rebuilding some of the web services and data caching layers.

And a couple of days later, I was invited to a management meeting with the senior management on the telecom’s side.

Long story short, my coding nights turned into drafting business requirements and coordinating milestones with the technical team. My CTO was a brilliant engineer and a great leadership model, but sucked at project management – so I had to step in and learn fast in order to get the ball rolling.

I carry that history into this because it is the same shift you are asking a team to make under deal pressure, only now the clock and the capital are not yours to waste. The lens throughout is value creation, not technique for its own sake.

What software development and management actually cost you

Switching from a traditional software engineering role to a team lead or a technical manager isn’t all about coding. In fact, it rarely revolves around programming chops anymore.

That distinction matters to a buyer because software development and management are two separate line items on your risk register. The engineering is the asset. The management is the control layer that decides whether the asset ships predictably or lurches from deadline to deadline burning EBITDA.

When I made the leap myself, I had to come up a couple of hours earlier and I would spend the time responding to emails and updating the roadmap with the latest client updates. The time spent with my team was mostly spent discussing roadblocks and assessing the challenges we had to work on as a team. At the end of the day, I was in charge of reviewing the latest batch of changes and updating different stakeholders with the latest updates.

We managed to hit the first couple of milestones and launched a beta of the product. I left the team (which included a few more developers since) and joined another team as a developer.

Nearly 4 months later, I was assigned to another techie who switched to a business analyst role. Suddenly, I got introduced to a couple of prospects and received an internal handbook on preparing flowcharts, feature diagrams, using case scenarios for both products.

I was left high and dry and expected to handle estimates for both projects, coordinate the communication with both customers, and sync with the local dev team as well. It wasn’t a full-time project managerial role as a third of my time was still spent on R&D – researching different toolkits and frameworks for a logistics company and a suitable web framework for a petrol corporation interested in an internal ERP.

It was a weird balance and definitely different from a traditional corporate promotion with a long-term onboarding time (or converting to a PM assistant role working with a senior team of project managers). But I managed to hit some wins and work hard in order to complete the required objectives.

This was good training for my transition to full-time freelancing and, later on, founding my own company. I still juggle multiple disciplines on a day-to-day basis which is probably a habit from my earlier days.

Your operator takeaway: when you inspect a portfolio company, separate the two costs. Ask who holds the management control layer and whether it survives the departure of any single person. If the answer is one overworked lead doing both jobs, you have a key-person risk priced into your hold, whether or not the model shows it. Name it in the first hundred days and fund a fix.

Handling different skill sets is a unique challenge that requires extensive research and adoption of the work challenges of each role in the project.

What makes managing a software development team a value risk

Managing a team is challenging in itself.

But handling a call center or a team with comparable skills and achievements is still different from managing a software development team.

The following are the major aspects of software team management that separate a team that compounds value from one that quietly leaks it. Read each as a diligence item, not a leadership tip.

Handling different skill sets

A technical project would require a team with diverse skills.

A good example would be a high-scale web application that depends on designers, front-end developers, back-end programmers, DevOps folks, system admins, QA engineers, and more.

I recorded a video about the disconnect between project managers and software developers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYIFZmStnpU

Handling different skill sets is a unique challenge that requires extensive research and adoption of the work challenges of each role in the project.

Professional managers cannot realistically cover all areas of expertise. However, studying each role is integral to building a strong team that operates successfully together. Lacking the skills to gauge experience and identify areas, where a member can chime in, will impact the balance within the department.

If you are not a technical manager, working closely with other senior technical members in the organization is mandatory. This could be the technical team lead within your own crew or the VP of engineering/CTO. For a sponsor, the decision is blunt: if no credible senior technical voice exists inside the company, you are underwriting a black box. Install or contract that voice before you commit further capital to the roadmap.

Dealing with strong personalities

Software developers are known to be more sensitive to certain topics than most other non-managerial roles. While not necessarily being a “rule of thumb”, the competitive landscape comes with the occasional strong opinion and a preference to solve a problem in a certain way.

Managing a team of software engineers can introduce additional challenges leading to heated discussions on the technical end.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Managing a sales team isn’t trivial either. Grunt workers often require micromanagement as they primarily take a low-end job “for a living”. Understanding how software engineers think and operate will help you make a smooth transition. The value point: the senior opinions in the room are usually where the real architectural risk and the real leverage both sit. When you assess a team, listen for whether those voices are heard or suppressed. A suppressed senior engineer is a resignation and a knowledge gap you will pay for during integration.

Managing resources when you are managing software teams

Resource management in software engineering is one of the trickiest aspects of them all. In fact, resource management issues are referred to as the reason behind 40% of failed projects. When you are managing software teams inside a portfolio company, a failed project is not an inconvenience, it is a missed quarter in the value creation plan.

Agile projects introduce short sprints and delays (or leaves) that may impact the milestones. Waterfall projects occasionally come with unexpected surprises that would eat up extra time.

Team members who switch between a couple of projects may also have a hard time focusing on the project at hand or handling all of the workloads at once. It is a fine balance, especially when you account for energy management, bringing some diversity, and creativity to the job profile, and handling motivation effectively.

Oftentimes, the challenges involved in resource management include:

• Responding to the increasing demands of the team and the client
• Delivering maximum value out of the bare minimum resource
• Getting the most out of scarce resources

What Donna Fitzgerald, president of Nimble PM and the former research VP at Gartner, suggests is that businesses must create a capacity planning strategy that involves the following steps:

• Find out the roles needed to complete a project
• Specify the number of people needed for these roles
• Determine the bottleneck resources of the entire project
• Cut demand to fit the supply depending on the project’s value

The capacity planning specifics may vary by industry. It is also just one of the steps you can take to effectively manage resources. The illustration below from Wrike provides a better understanding of the responsibilities involved in resource management.

According to Wrike, effective resource management helps avoid future problems and burnout, provides a safety net, shows transparency, and gives you a better idea of what works in your planning and the ROI. 

Your call as an operator: demand a capacity plan tied to the value creation roadmap, not to a wish list of features. If the team cannot tell you which resource is the bottleneck on the two initiatives that move revenue, forecast reliability is a fiction and you should treat the roadmap dates as aspirations until proven otherwise.

Hacking quick turnover

The competitive market leads to a quick turnover. Software engineers usually stay with a company for about 2 years (the number may be higher for more reputable companies offering better perks).

But, turnover is somewhat common. A report shows that the tech industry has the highest turnover. 

See the breakdown of rates below.

Image source: LinkedIn

Handling a quick turnover requires a multitude of hacks when it comes to hiring and onboarding, managing a software development team working on other projects, and handling the ever-changing scope of work.

You can reduce turnover by providing a competitive compensation package with other employee perks on top, allowing flexibility and a sense of freedom, improving your company culture, ensuring a healthy work environment, and investing in the career development of your team. 

But in cases where you have to facilitate onboarding new team members, the complexity of the engineering job combined with short retention cycles commands the need for additional documentation and onboarding. Plan your monthly or quarterly schedule and ensure that technical documentation, commit messages, your project management system, everything is kept clean and easy to follow by the new team. For a PE reader, turnover is a direct hit to the multiple: every departure that erases undocumented knowledge is unrealized integration risk. The fix is retention economics for the two or three people who cannot be lost, plus documentation that makes any single exit survivable.

Compensating for lack of technical background

I’ve met development team managers with a purely business background that did well at the job – but the majority of the non-technical managers may have a hard time understanding feedback or complaints from their team.

Accepting client requests lightly that may be complex on the technical end may build up pressure, too. Nagging team members without understanding the underlying layers will also cause some extra tension.

Our head of PM is not an engineer herself. But she’s investing a good chunk of time in reverse-engineering business requirements, understanding the high-level caveats that the tech team meets, identifying ambiguous areas that would otherwise contribute to scope creep. If you sit on the board and cannot translate engineering feedback into EBITDA and diligence risk, you need someone who can sit between you and the team. That is a cheaper line item than a stalled roadmap.

Simplifying ambiguous requirements

Unlike other, more straightforward roles, software engineering is about turning business requirements into practical applications.

Most roadmaps and specifications are up for interpretation. Therefore, 10 different engineers may easily build 10 different versions of a product – with varying flexibility, stability, scalability, and workflows.

Being unable to manage those upfront will impact the milestones and lead to consecutive iterations of back and forth. That back and forth is rework, and rework is cash burned against the plan. Insist that every material initiative starts with a written, agreed definition of done before a developer touches it.

Keeping up with the dynamic nature of the industry

Assembling a software development team often includes roles with different levels of skills and experience.

Due to the dynamic nature of the industry, assigning the right people to the right assignments is quite a challenge. Junior developers may handle repetitive and somewhat easy work.

But this may also require additional layers in-between in order to simplify the business process.

Failing to design the right architecture from day 1 results in technical debt that keeps creeping up during the ongoing development of the project. Technical debt is a liability that does not appear on the balance sheet until it shows up as slowed delivery or a failed audit. Ask for an honest debt inventory early, because you will inherit it either way.

Maintaining variety and excitement

Software developers often leave companies due to poor management, but some “job hop” for more exciting opportunities. Engineers want to evolve and progress without sticking to the same boring job over and over again.

When I say “boring job” I’m not referring to a single company. Maintaining a variety on the job with interesting projects, career opportunities, collaborating with new team members may be more than enough to keep your engineers sharp and help them develop new skills on the way.

Project managers need to be proactive in monitoring mood swings or keeping a developer on the same type of activity for too long. Juniors need to progress slowly and seniors need to undertake different types of challenges. It’s an art in itself. For a hold-period owner, this is retention risk in disguise. The cheapest retention lever you have is meaningful work, and it costs far less than backfilling a senior who left bored.

Juggling responsibilities across managing development teams

Bringing the right attitude to the team is not easy.

A great project manager should juggle the team’s workload, the senior management’s requirements, and the client’s wishes.

It’s a fine balance that aims to boost morale in-house while getting the work done. In a platform with several add-on acquisitions, managing development teams across entities multiplies that balancing act. Decide early whether you run them federated or consolidated, because leaving it undecided is itself a decision that costs you speed.

Software development management without a technical seat at the table

Collaborating with experienced technical leads is always the best possible way to move forward. Project managers can team up with CTOs or tech leads, what about senior management though? Sound software development management does not require you to read code, but it does require a reliable translation layer between the team and the people underwriting the plan.

I always advise non-technical executives to find a technical co-founder, a reliable external consultant, or appoint a person in the team who could take that role accordingly.

The thing is, programming is executed primarily behind the scenes. It’s not something that you can evaluate visually. It is comprised of software architectures and different layers in charge of stability, performance, compatibility, security.

If you are unable to find the right person who can conduct independent code reviews or assess code quality, I would focus on two separate areas:

1. Defining actionable requirements and use cases
2. Setting measurable and practical KPIs upfront

The first part revolves around creating a process in terms of defining a feature set and the expected behavior.

It’s easy to point your team in the right direction if you are a technical person. Still, you can leverage some proven processes for creating assignments or reporting bugs and usability issues. This is where knowing how to manage a software development project without a technical background becomes a governance skill rather than a coding one.

Here’s the bug report template that our technical team uses in-house:

Our technical leads and technical project managers are required to fill out all fields before assigning the task to a developer. While you may omit some of the areas, providing as much context as possible is paramount.

• Explain the business case in detail.
• List down your steps to reproduce and outline the expected behavior as well.
• Point to screenshots, note your browser and OS, attach screenshots.
• If you feel like it’s a minor bug, you can suggest an estimated completion time which is up for discussion.

The decision this drives: make disciplined requirements and reporting a condition of funding, not a nicety. A team that cannot produce a clean brief is a team whose estimates you cannot trust.

Use cases and use diagrams

When creating new tasks as a non-developer, pick a use case template that would define that context in a systematized manner. There’s a great collection of use case templates available at 40 Use Case Templates & Examples (Word, PDF) – Template Lab, for example:

More complex use cases may benefit from use case diagrams as well:

Note how different roles are involved with (and have access to) different features and components of the applications.

Developers who are not familiar with the complete context may misunderstand the initial requirements without a detailed brief discussing the available use cases. This sort of diagram may help them define the feature set in a more optimal manner, designing the right routers and validation layers under the hood.

It’s all about providing as much context, details, and required constraints as possible. Access diagrams double as an audit artifact, so keep them current. They answer diligence questions before an acquirer asks them.

Measuring KPIs a board can read

A developer needs to know what should be built and what are the desired limitations of the solution. You want the full feature set covered without exposing features to certain scenarios.

The second part requires setting technical KPIs that don’t require a programming background.

For instance, we have three core pillars of development in DevriX that we focus on in every step of the way:

1. Stability
2. Security
3. Speed

While these can’t always be measured without a complete code review, there are ways to define some future KPIs and gauge them during the development process.

For example:

• The system needs to work without interruptions with 5,000 registered users.
• 50 registered accounts should be browsing the backend simultaneously without crashing the application.
• The code base has to comply with X coding standards.
• I want the platform to handle 500,000 monthly visitors.
• The knowledge base should load for under 5 seconds when we have 80,000 published articles.
• The system should pass Y security test or a review by Z security team.

The good news is that most KPIs can be measured without reaching the peak point at the end of the process.

• There are load/stress testing tools online that you could run independently. They report on load times, maximum concurrent users, or any technical errors with system outages.
• A test with multiple simultaneous users working with the platform is feasible when you invite a group of friends and ask them to help for an hour.
• Various static testing tools and scripts can run your codebase and ensure that the best practices are followed.
• The same goes for security applications (like penetration testing tools) or agencies that charge a flat fee for an external black box review.

It’s not ideal, but it works. The reason this matters at board level: these KPIs convert opaque engineering into management visibility. Stability, security and speed thresholds are proxies for downtime risk, breach risk and conversion, all of which map to revenue and to how a future buyer will price the asset. Hold the team to numbers you can verify without a code review, and you have turned software development for managers into something you can actually govern.

Managing a team alone is challenging. Software development teams have unique traits.

Custom software development for portfolio companies: what to inspect before you fund another sprint

When private equity enters the picture, whether through acquisition, growth investment, or platform consolidation, the stakes around development team management multiply overnight. The strategies that work for organic growth need a harder edge when outside capital is involved. Investors want to know exactly what they are buying, and portfolio company operators need governance structures that survive leadership changes and integration timelines. Custom software development for portfolio companies is rarely valued for its own sake. It is valued for the revenue it protects, the integration it enables, and the diligence risk it removes.

I have seen deals stall because nobody could explain who actually owned the codebase. I have watched integration projects burn months of runway because documentation existed only in the heads of developers who left during the transition. These are not edge cases. They are predictable failure modes that development team managers can prevent with the right structures in place. Each one below is framed as an inspection with a decision attached.

Code ownership as the foundation of technical due diligence

Technical due diligence always surfaces the same question: who owns what? Not philosophically, but practically. When an investor or acquirer examines your development organization, they want to trace every line of production code back to clear ownership, both legal and operational.

Legal ownership sounds straightforward until you realize that contractor agreements from three years ago might have ambiguous IP assignment clauses, or that a critical library was contributed by a consultant who never signed a work-for-hire agreement. Operational ownership is equally messy. If your lead backend developer leaves tomorrow, does anyone else understand the authentication layer well enough to ship a security patch?

For teams preparing for any capital event, I recommend implementing a code ownership registry. This is not a complex system. It is a maintained document that maps every major system component to a primary owner, a backup owner, and the date of last knowledge transfer. Review it quarterly. Update it whenever someone changes roles or exits.

A thorough technology due diligence checklist will probe these ownership structures extensively. Better to have clear answers before the questions arrive than to scramble during a deal process. The decision: if IP ownership is ambiguous, resolve it before close or price the risk into the deal. Do not paper over it.

Release risk and what keeps acquirers up at night

Development teams ship code. That is the job. But from an investment perspective, every release represents risk: risk of downtime, risk of security exposure, risk of customer-facing bugs that damage the brand. Acquirers and portfolio operators want to understand the controls around that risk.

The questions typically follow a pattern. How often do you deploy? What happens before code reaches production? Who can push to production, and under what conditions? What is your rollback procedure, and when was it last tested? How long does it take to ship an emergency fix?

Teams that lack clear answers to these questions signal operational immaturity. That does not mean every organization needs enterprise-grade change management. It means the controls should match the risk profile of the business. A B2B SaaS platform handling financial data needs different release governance than an internal tool with twelve users.

Document your release process in enough detail that a new team member could follow it. Include the approval gates, the testing requirements, and the communication protocols. This documentation serves double duty: it improves daily operations and demonstrates institutional knowledge that survives personnel changes. What good looks like: a deploy that any competent engineer can run, a rollback tested this year, and an emergency fix path measured in hours. If you cannot demonstrate that, fund the fix before you fund the next feature.

Documentation as a governance asset

Technical documentation is usually treated as a chore. Teams create it reluctantly, update it sporadically, and abandon it entirely when deadlines pressure mounts. From an operational governance standpoint, this is a serious weakness.

Documentation is not about making life easier for developers, though it does that. It is about reducing key-person risk, accelerating onboarding, and enabling technology integration when companies combine. An M&A integration playbook cannot execute effectively if the target company’s systems exist only as tribal knowledge.

Minimum viable documentation for governance purposes includes architecture diagrams current within the last six months, API documentation for all external interfaces, data flow diagrams showing how information moves between systems, and runbooks for critical operational procedures. This is not exhaustive documentation of every function and method. It is strategic documentation of the decisions and structures that define how the system works. What it costs when it is wrong: months of integration runway and a slower path to synergy capture. Set the six-month freshness bar and hold it.

A delivery controls assessment you can score

The following framework helps development team managers evaluate their readiness for external scrutiny, whether from investors, acquirers, or new executive leadership. Score each area honestly. A low score is not a failure; it is a prioritization signal.

Control Area	Basic (1 point)	Intermediate (2 points)	Mature (3 points)
Code Ownership	Ownership is informal and based on who wrote the code	Primary owners documented for major systems	Ownership registry with backups, reviewed quarterly
Access Control	Developers have broad access; no regular audits	Role-based access with annual reviews	Principle of least privilege; access logged and audited quarterly
Release Process	Ad hoc deployments by whoever is available	Documented process with required approvals	Automated pipeline with enforced gates and audit trail
Rollback Capability	Manual rollback possible but untested	Documented rollback procedure tested semi-annually	Automated rollback with tested recovery time under 30 minutes
Architecture Documentation	Outdated or nonexistent diagrams	Current diagrams for critical systems	Comprehensive documentation updated with each major change
Knowledge Redundancy	Single points of failure across critical systems	Most systems have at least two knowledgeable team members	All critical systems have documented knowledge transfer and cross-training

A score of 12 or higher suggests readiness for most due diligence processes. Below 9 indicates governance gaps that could slow or complicate capital events. These scores are illustrative; adjust the thresholds based on your industry’s regulatory environment and the sophistication of likely investors or acquirers. Run this in the first hundred days, then again before you take the asset to market.

Practical steps for managing development teams under a hold period

If you manage a development team and anticipate any form of external investment or acquisition activity in the next two years, start building governance structures now. Retroactive documentation under deal pressure is expensive and often incomplete.

• Conduct a quarterly code ownership review and update your registry
• Document your release process and test your rollback procedure at least twice per year
• Audit production access rights and remove unnecessary permissions
• Identify single points of failure in system knowledge and schedule cross-training
• Keep architecture documentation within six months of current state
• Maintain a list of all third-party dependencies with license types and renewal dates

None of this replaces the fundamentals of managing a development team well. You still need to hire effectively, communicate clearly, and ship quality software. But governance structures protect the value you create. They make technical due diligence smoother, technology integration faster, and leadership transitions less disruptive. For teams operating in a PE-backed environment or preparing for one, these controls are not optional overhead. They are competitive advantage. Assign an owner and a deadline to each line above, or none of it happens.

How to build a software development team that survives diligence

The sections above tell you how to judge a team you have inherited. This one is for when the plan requires you to add capacity or stand up a new group inside a portfolio company. Knowing how to build a software development team under a hold period is a different discipline from building one for a lifestyle business, because everything you assemble will eventually be inspected by a buyer.

Building a software development team for a PE-backed company means starting from the exit and working backward. Every hire, every contract, every dependency should be one you would be comfortable defending in a data room. That reframes the usual advice. When you are managing developers you brought on specifically to hit the value creation plan, you want an experienced software development team that can operate without heroics, not a cheaper group that requires constant rescue.

Three decisions drive most of the outcome. First, decide build versus buy versus a managed software development partner, and decide it on the basis of what protects the multiple, not what feels cheapest this quarter. A managed software development arrangement can de-risk a gap quickly, but only if the contract assigns IP cleanly and the knowledge transfers back to you. Second, when you use managed software developers or contractors, treat IP assignment and documentation as close conditions, not afterthoughts. Third, decide how the software developer team maps to the roadmap, so that no single initiative on the value creation plan depends on a single unbackfilled person.

The standard to hold: any team you manage development team by manage development team should be able to lose one senior person without losing a quarter. If it cannot, you have not finished building it. Inspect that resilience before you sign off on the org, and fund the redundancy while it is cheap rather than after a resignation forces your hand.

How to lead a software development team toward the exit

Being a development team leader is all about effective communication.

From understanding mood swings to gathering technical caveats, monitoring for tension between team members, or noticing cases of low energy due to external factors, you must:

• Make sure that you define your requirements properly by providing the context your technical team needs.
• Set realistic expectations that could be measured externally.

You should be good to go until you start scaling your business a bit and can allocate resources to a technical consultant or partner up with a technical co-founder. Knowing how to lead a software development team inside a hold period comes down to that same discipline, applied to a clock: define the work in terms the value creation plan can measure, and hold expectations that a future buyer can verify.

So do not end this at a summary. End it at the decision you own. Walk the team you inherited or underwrote through the delivery controls score, name the two gaps that most threaten the multiple, and put a person and a date against each. The teams that clear diligence without drama are the ones whose owners treated software development team management as a value-creation lever from day one, not a fire to fight in the last mile before exit. That is the choice in front of you, and it is yours to make this quarter.

For more management tips, head to this management guide for executives that we have prepared for you.