Managing Tech Teams

by Scott Davis | at MinneBar 11

*This is a repeat of the session from last year for those who missed it. It received over 100 tweets and re-tweets so I decided to resubmit.

I've spent most of my career managing developers, from informal peer-to-peer leadership, to big corporate structure. In recent years I am most often approached by non-technical entrepreneurs attempting to start a technology company, with no experience or skill in working with those of us who are the "difficult to deal with" nerds and geeks.

Scott is CEO of QONQR, a bootstrapped mobile gaming company in Minneapolis and former adjunct professor at St Mary's University in the Information Technology Management program. This session will be a 50 minute summary of the master's class Scott teaches on "Managing Technology Teams". We'll focus on the negative stereotypes, communication issues, trust concerns, and the challenge of ambiguity. The goal is not to teach entrepreneurs how to best manage your technical team, but expose the dynamics of working with technical teams that may be new to non-technical managers, or software developers not accustomed to working with new tech managers.

All levels

Scott Davis

Scott is the CEO of QONQR. He has been a software developer longer than he hasn't. Scott holds an MBA in New Venture Management from the University of St Thomas.

"QONQR: World In Play" is a game on the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. Players use the GPS on their phones to battle for and capture the towns and cities where they live, work and play. Since the release in March of 2012, over a million towns and cities, spanning nearly every country in the world have been captured. QONQR is a MMO (Massively Mulitiplayer) location-based mobile game, which now covers 36% of the populated Earth.