Google Tech Talks May 6, 2008 ABSTRACT When you look around, there are a lot of leaders recommended for software development. We have the functional manager and the project manager, the scrum master and the black belt, the product owner and the customer-on-site, the technical leader and the architect, the product manager and the chief engineer. Clearly that’s too many leaders. So how many leaders should there be, what should they do, what shouldn’t they do, and what skills do they need? This will be a presentation and discussion of leadership roles in software development — what works, what doesn’t and why. Speaker: Mary Poppendieck Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager. Mary considered retirement 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word “waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development. Over the past six years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and …