1, control the schedule
If don't know how to control the
schedule, the manager will fail. Typically, for a small company, they
have no enough resource to wait. If the project failed, the first
person to fire is the manager.
2, keep engineers life easy
Try
to make them happy. Don't blame them, even if they made mistakes. Try
to encourage them. Encouraging makes people happy, full of passion, and
eager to do more contributions. 1:1 meeting with each engineer once per
2 weeks.
3, guarantee quality of the product
The quality
should be guaranteed step by step. Code review every 1 or 2 weeks.
Refactoring once per week. Unit test for all components (try test
driven development).