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"PM, want a cracker?"
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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I know this is just a joke, but I’ve recently become a project manager for the first time. I’m open to tips and suggestions.
I’ve really enjoyed it and have worked hard to give my developers everything they need as soon as possible. Otherwise I try to stay out of the way and do my best to shield them from the pressure that’s being applied on me to achieve deadlines.
I’d agree that anyone can ask for project updates, but I really do work hard to balance client demands with c-suite expectations and the realistic outcomes described by my developers.
You seem like a person who wants to try and do well and be a good manager. So be very careful of burnout, because the constant tension between doing what is right for your team and meeting upper-management expectations can drive you crazy. It did me anyway, which is why I don't manage anymore.
Take regular vacations and actually disconnect from work when you do. Try to do the same for at least 1 or 2 weekends per month. Being organized is important and helps with the job and the burnout, but there's a thin line between "keeping notes in Obsidian keeps me focused" and "my entire 2nd job is now maintaining Jira tickets."
Organization is for you, keep it for you, and don't let your organizing become a part of your "public api" or else it'll become another avenue for status updates that you're obliged to maintain. Turning your notes and private charts into data for upper management is why you compile special reports, just for them.
Really helpful. Yeah, it’s already invaded my vacations and time off, but I’m working to create better boundaries moving forward. The problem is that there’s literally no one else who can answer certain questions or resolve certain problems and everything will grind to a halt if I don’t deal with it in a timely manner.
I mean, if they want more coverage, they can hire more staff. At some point, just as you stand up for your reports, you have to be willing to say no when it comes to you.
Yeah man, that's how it starts. You become the guy to answer question and before you know it you will be assigning tickets to yourself because nobody else can solve them.
Please be careful, I would not recommend that to anyone after living though it once.
This might sound twisted, but something that helped me take more time to myself was when a guy who was "the only one who could answer certain questions" with something like 30 years of experience in our field dropped dead of a heart attack at home. We figured out what we needed to figure out soon enough and his position wasn't filled for a year because five or six of us took up the tasks he was in charge of... My point being, no one is irreplaceable. Disconnect when you're not at work.
Do questions really need to be answered outside of work time? Are blockers identifiable in advance so a plan can be put in place. Not many things need to be done outside work hours and team members can cover vacation if something desperately needs to be done.
Yes and no? My team is scattered around the US, so if my east coasters hit a snag early, I genuinely don't want them in a holding pattern until I get around to it. Same for my coworkers on the west coast.
Some of the intensity of it has been that I assumed control of a team that was already severely mismanaged and had missed it's initial deadlines by a month.
Of course that manager got promoted to an area that better suited his skills and I was asked to step in and try to right the ship. Our final deadline is today and we only have minor and cosmetic bugs left (that we know of).
We have plenty of new features to add moving forward, but with the project back on track and the foundation established, I'll be able to set better deadlines for everyone's work life balance.
I will probably always have some temptation to pull long hours for my team scattered around the country, but it becomes much less urgent now that we're past our insane crunch.
Maybe it's hopelessly naive of me and the next deadline will also become a crunch, but I have some control over those future dates, so I hope it will be less of an issue.
Are they paying you for covering three timezones' business hours, or are they paying you for about 8 hours in your timezone?
That's a fair point.
I always thought project managers were useless until I got a good one. Then I realized the issue was that most I've dealt with were as useful as this parrot
The key of a good PM is to know their job is to ensure you can do yours. My good PM had that internalized and his only goal was to remove obstacles for us... glorious times
So if I were to say, "I'm playing phone tag with the vendors liaison because all he does is poorly repeat what I ask to others inside the company", my good PM would get on the phone with the vendor and get a list of contacts so I could skip the crappy middle man
Another time I said, the network folks don't agree with the security folks on how to proceed. He would get everyone in the same room and get all ducks in a row, then let me know what the decision was.
If I said, I'm wasting half my day asking for availability to book meetings, he would ask who I needed to talk to and book everything himself
Yeah for sure. You summed up 90% of my job. The rest of it is the parts people don't like - making people update Jira tickets, etc.
There's some good advice below. I'm not a programmer (vastly different field), but the most important things you can do are to:
get to know your technical people; their skills, and their personalities
trust your technical people when they say something is difficult to do.
These two steps will help you get a lot of 'good will' from your team and make them feel like you've got their back.
Was working on a team of 4 people, each with a different skillset (frontend, backend, design, CMS). The project manager basically just told us what we have to do in which order, without explicitly telling us who or how someone should do it, which i think everyone appreciated and worked really well for everyone.
In my last role there was no project management, and the Boss just assigned random tasks to anyone, regardless of his skillset. One week i had to work on jQuery UI from 10 years ago, next week on some exotic server language with barely any documentation, no examples and no stack overflow help. His philosopy was "fuck your skills and preferences, everyone has to know everything!".
Before I quit there was some meeting how everyone must now learn video editing, because the product documentation (still with IE 6 screenshots) was not updated anymore but instead we would teach and explain the product in videos "because tiktok is very popular nowdays".
12 year SDE + 12 year TPM vet here.
Do everything you can to help your software engineers (or whoever is doing the work) have as much focus time as they need. Buffer your meetings and questions to one chunk of time per day. Encourage them to block-out and protect their focus time. And encourage the team to keep office hours so they can still make themselves available to others, but in a controlled way.
Be transparent with the business's goals and frustrations you are facing. There's an attitude (often among inexperienced devs) that PMs are good for nothing; just an interface to the rest of the business, and a source of where tasks come from. And some certainly are that, but a good PM is worth their weight in gold.
Find a good mentor, and start thinking about your next career step now.
Really good advice, thank you.
Happy cake day! I didn't know there is cake day in lemmy
Do retros every week or two and use them to improve the process. Best way to learn from others.
Just being forced to talk about how it's going and what's blocking can be helpful, so I'm glad you're questioning for to be more useful, not doing a little rubber-ducking isn't all bad.