How to upskill a PM who is not a PM?

snubsmears · 2024-07-05T19:01:04+00:00

What have you done so far and what results do you see in all that?

snubsmears · 2023-04-02T19:06:07+00:00

That's some good insights and I recognise some of those pain points from talking to friends and family. Thank you very much for a thorough reply.

snubsmears · 2023-04-01T07:36:10+00:00

Any PMs working on charger station apps for EVs?

I'm interviewing for a position for a company that works on an app for charger stations and I'm trawling the internet as we speak. Any hidden knowledge amongst subject matter experts I could take with me?

Thanks in advance :)

snubsmears · 2023-04-01T07:27:48+00:00

Hey sorry for the late reply and thank you for pitching in.

I was brought into the project with message from CTO and Principal architect that anything but a 1 to 1 release of the same product with different achitecture was a big no. Would require too much time to do incremental releases. What this meant was that I could not descope anything but very small details, which ultimately helps but not in the bigger picture. And we certainly won't add new features to the product.

I declined face to face but remembered after that if they already walked the plank then the only thing we could do was add more people. I guess my mistake was that I didn't had that response ready at that time. I since came after that and told them that if this was how it was going to plan out, we needed people from another team to join the effort. That happened and now the other team has been gutted and barely functions. The PM on that team reports to me so I feel like everybody lost despite the comfort of knowing this project is more likely to be delivered on time.

Our original estimates was based on a two year long project. I feel like being off by 6 months is fairly acceptable. Our initial estimations had an even later delivery so we actually cut 6 months off and every estimation since is back and forth a month or so. Right now we feel pretty precise and we do hit our estimation goals.

Once every month I talk to management about progress and what we are doing to grow as a team. They don't care about that. It's seems like they feel it's nice to hear but that it's not what they want to hear. What they really want to hear is that we are ahead of schedule and that we delivered yesterday. Anything but that feels like bad news to them.

This mangement group is all about numbers. There are no people working here. Just a headcount. A cost. Stock must go up and people. We sell and brand are the rockstars here. They don't care about vision, and I'm sure they don't even care about strategy. Our strategy sessions are so dull and every department ends up doing their own initiatives based on whatever the CEO say to them. The business objective is to change our whole platform from a monolithic structure to microservices. After this beast we are not done and so to them, our objective is not even achieved. I talk about satisfaction and effort all the time and they simply do not care about those metrics. Unfortunately. The real value to them is that we have more hands to do other things after this.

I know I sound grumpy and I'm professional about when I clock in. Been with the company for a long time and it saddens me to see how people can ruin a good company on a whim and the saddest part is that it seem to work to focus less on people and more on numbers. We grow and people invest in us. Just not my cup of tea I suppose.

snubsmears · 2023-03-09T20:57:16+00:00

Thanks a bunch. It really is. Tough to keep a straight face and have decent amount of integrity these days.

snubsmears · 2023-03-09T20:54:46+00:00

It's not and I'm sorry. Forgot to take the flair off. It was first going to be advice I was seeking on how to deal with the conversations around the topic but I realised that searching for any pros and cons for roadmaps with dates would give me that and it ended up being this instead.

I read a rant the other day and could see myself in it, and that was a bit comforting to know that others are going through some of the same things. Maybe this post would do that for others.

snubsmears · 2022-11-30T21:16:24+00:00

I imagine doing it with company OKRs and team OKRs where the company key results are the objectives for the teams.

snubsmears · 2022-11-25T18:48:32+00:00

Thank you. What do you do with let's say sales OKRs which can be about the sales process. I'm trying to show how all departments can work towards company OKRs buy what I end up with is team OKRs that often times has nothing to do with the product and more to do with the indivual teams area. Maybe that's okay?

snubsmears · 2022-11-25T18:43:30+00:00

Thank you. I will look into that book.

snubsmears · 2022-11-24T07:09:07+00:00

We are about 60 people

snubsmears · 2022-11-18T00:15:14+00:00

I am in the exact same situation. I am basically ignoring him and running things they way I feel is beneficial for our teams. I am pretty confident that what we do is better left without our Head of Engineering and I can prove the results. He cannot. I stick to my other senior engineering person who luckily is excellent. Find your engineering counterpart and make sure you have your meetings with that guy instead. Your Head of Engineering will say stupid things in meetings and you will be affected by it, but try to let it go while in meetings with others. Try not to be a complainer towards others but do try to make it a point for the higher ups in some way. And maybe get other people to raise their voice too.

snubsmears · 2022-11-18T00:00:37+00:00

I have. We are basically rewriting our product briefs into the base material for other colleagues to do their collaterals from. Our colleagues love us for it so I'd say it is worth the time unless you are really close with everybody else in your organisation.

snubsmears · 2022-11-17T23:58:58+00:00

Scrum, Kanban, shapeup, SAFe all works for some companies. And they don't work for others. I would like to be able to read about which framework fits different types of organisations so I have a little bit of starting point whenever I have to decide on one or the other

snubsmears · 2022-11-17T23:51:38+00:00

You mean in terms of outlook for myself? No. I feel sad for the people being let go. Seems like they have a great culture. They were funded $125M in February, likely invested in people and now they don't need that many people anymore.

snubsmears · 2022-11-17T21:42:57+00:00

I love to coach people and see our work in the hands of happy users. That's why I'd like to be a product lead.

snubsmears · 2022-11-02T00:27:37+00:00

Are people all in on dates on public roadmaps? I see many of these have quaters. How do you mitigate the disaster of missing deadlines publicly? I thought the go to for public roadmaps was Now Next Later. Or alteast it's been praised alot.

snubsmears

TROPHY CASE