Experimenting with a new People Manager role in a LeSS adoption

In our presentation we want to share our knowledge and experience in the People Manager role, and how it has impacted our LeSS adoption.

We will cover how our department decided to move away from the more traditional technical line managers and recruited two ladies with long careers in HR. We will try to explain how the People Manager role is designed to keep our organisation structure as flat as possible; and to share some light on the people processes we’ve introduced since coming on board.

With our story we want to share our learnings with you and will also give you some food for thought in what kind of set-ups People Manager role could potentially work in. We hope our story will inspire you to consider how to approach the people side of things in your own organisation maybe in a bit of a more experimental way.

In Wärtsilä DPD we have adopted LeSS around 2 year ago. For the past 1.5 years we have experimented with a new People Manager role who is the (corporate) line manager for the developers. Currently we have two People Managers in Netherlands and Finland who would be the presenters of this talk in the conference and the aim is to share our knowledge and experiences to the audience. A year ago we have moved to LeSS Huge and really started to focus on broadening of skills, co-location (post pandemic), how to treat internal/external developers, how to set (corporate demanded) department targets and several other people focused topics. The People Managers do not have technical background so we are also experimenting how to bring technical expertise into the line organization set-up with "Line team" experiment as well as a new role of Technical Mentors.