6 ms·

What does a program manager do all day?

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I didn't RTA, but traditionally? Work with marketing, infrastructure, release, and project managers to create the program and ensure it stays on-track.
- amichail 17y ago
  What sort of authority does a program manager have? Can't employees just ignore what he/she says?
  - raganwald 17y ago
    If the only reason people pay attention to you is that you have the ability to fire them, you aren't much of a manager. I worked for years as a team lead. I had no authority to fire anyone, or dock their pay, the most I could do was to say nasty things about them like "They have their own independent ideas about how to get things done instead of genuflecting to me." If he was a good program manager, people would have respected what he did, which was to understand the market for the product so well that he could inspire and lead the team to build the right thing at the right time.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    Depends on the company. Since a Program Manager sits above multiple projects, some companies think of them as just a coordination role -- a little more than a PM but not yet a director. But other companies think of them more like super-PMs, parachuting into their poorer-performing projects and taking over until the PM and the team can get their act together. In these tougher Program Manager roles, they're responsible for the day-to-day life-or-death of the project. Sadly, more companies are leaning to the idea that the Program Manager is more like a fancy clerk. They end up pretty stressed out and under-appreciated. This gets to the central question: How do you create, run, and release a huge effort that might take hundreds of man-years, like Office 2012? Something like that covers a lot more ground than simply kicking out some code. There are all sorts of things that need to be coordinated. Companies are still sorting through how to set up and run programs, in my opinion. There is a LOT of room for screwing things up between 5 guys and 150 guys. There are a lot of tricks to use, but many times people want simple answers and the simple answers are not forthcoming. A lot of time employees just go to their PM and then go around the Program Manager directly to the higher-ups in the organization. Makes the whole thing quickly devolve into a Charlie Foxtrot. (Disclaimer: I've done quite a bit of setting up programs and helping companies manage them) EDIT: I've describe a Program Manager as being "over" the entire effort. Some companies just kick them out to the side of the whole thing. This is an even worse setup, because the business drivers aren't directly connected to the work.
    - nostrademons 17y ago
      "How do you create, run, and release a huge effort that might take hundreds of man-years, like Office 2012?" I think that more and more, companies are realizing that the answer to this is "You don't." Google Chrome is a good example. Instead of trying to figure out exactly what needed to be in the product, they built a kick-ass updater (which is now open-source). One that let them transparently and efficiently download and install updates whenever necessary, so they could treat desktop software like a webapp. And then instead of having to coordinate hundreds of man-years of work, they can have small independent teams that crank out a feature, release it, see if the feature works well, and back it out if necessary. The best way to deal with an O(N!) problem is to keep N small.
      - robryan 17y ago
        Their worlds apart though, enterprise would be bringing in a lot of the money on Office, they'd want something they can roll out and only periodically patch, they want something they can rely upon from day one. Chrome is a free product that already achieves it's main aims, if chrome was a $200 browser or something I'd imagine it would have to conform to the big release idea to.
        nostrademons 17y ago
        Chrome got out of beta before GMail because Chrome has a bunch of OEM deals. I don't know the terms of those deals, but I imagine there's money changing hands, and that they are of strategic importance both for the OEMs and for Google: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10106174-62.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10106174-62.html There's some resistance to using auto-updating software in enterprises simply because it's not the way things have traditionally been done, but IT departments are warming up to it. The huge pain of doing a major upgrade and the constant security fiascos that come from using software that's 5 years out of date are a major incentive for departments to switch to a model where individual changes can be canaried and tested in isolation before bringing down the whole enterprise. Google Docs is certainly having some measure of success in the enterprise arena, despite being a webapp with this development model. And outside of Google, Salesforce.com has revolutionized their market with a webservice-based enterprise app.
raganwald 17y ago
Traditionally, program managers say "What" and "Why," project managers say "When," and development managers say "How" (which encompasses "Who"). I guess facility managers used to say "Where," but that's stretching things...
- amichail 17y ago
  Wouldn't development managers and developers resent having program managers around telling them what should be built?
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Well, no. If you're a developer or development manager working 70-90 hours a week developing and/or managing other developers, when do you have time to evaluate the market, keep track of every single competitor and potential competitor? Do you run a spreadsheet loaded up with market data and demographics evaluating the potential revenue impact for all of the features you're thinking of including in the next release? And so on and so forth. Product management is a full-time job on a substantial product. It may be that in small start-ups people wear many hats and you don't need it as a separate function. But if your team ever gets to the point that you can justify a full-time development manager, your team probably needs someone else with nearly full-time product management responsibility. In addition to that, there are sometimes some benefits to separating product management from development management. Sometimes. Being a little divorced from the product's inner workings can provide a certain useful perspective. Hopefully, the product manager isn't wedded to the feature that a developer just spent three weeks building and can jettison it to ship on time :-)
    - amichail 17y ago
      You are thinking of what's best for the company, not the developers. For some people, development is only rewarding if they determine what to build.
      - rmaccloy 17y ago
ruff 17y ago
http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.asp...

I didn't RTA, but traditionally? Work with marketing, infrastructure, release, and project managers to create the program and ensure it stays on-track.

amichail 17y ago
What sort of authority does a program manager have? Can't employees just ignore what he/she says?
- raganwald 17y ago
  If the only reason people pay attention to you is that you have the ability to fire them, you aren't much of a manager. I worked for years as a team lead. I had no authority to fire anyone, or dock their pay, the most I could do was to say nasty things about them like "They have their own independent ideas about how to get things done instead of genuflecting to me." If he was a good program manager, people would have respected what he did, which was to understand the market for the product so well that he could inspire and lead the team to build the right thing at the right time.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  Depends on the company. Since a Program Manager sits above multiple projects, some companies think of them as just a coordination role -- a little more than a PM but not yet a director. But other companies think of them more like super-PMs, parachuting into their poorer-performing projects and taking over until the PM and the team can get their act together. In these tougher Program Manager roles, they're responsible for the day-to-day life-or-death of the project. Sadly, more companies are leaning to the idea that the Program Manager is more like a fancy clerk. They end up pretty stressed out and under-appreciated. This gets to the central question: How do you create, run, and release a huge effort that might take hundreds of man-years, like Office 2012? Something like that covers a lot more ground than simply kicking out some code. There are all sorts of things that need to be coordinated. Companies are still sorting through how to set up and run programs, in my opinion. There is a LOT of room for screwing things up between 5 guys and 150 guys. There are a lot of tricks to use, but many times people want simple answers and the simple answers are not forthcoming. A lot of time employees just go to their PM and then go around the Program Manager directly to the higher-ups in the organization. Makes the whole thing quickly devolve into a Charlie Foxtrot. (Disclaimer: I've done quite a bit of setting up programs and helping companies manage them) EDIT: I've describe a Program Manager as being "over" the entire effort. Some companies just kick them out to the side of the whole thing. This is an even worse setup, because the business drivers aren't directly connected to the work.
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    "How do you create, run, and release a huge effort that might take hundreds of man-years, like Office 2012?" I think that more and more, companies are realizing that the answer to this is "You don't." Google Chrome is a good example. Instead of trying to figure out exactly what needed to be in the product, they built a kick-ass updater (which is now open-source). One that let them transparently and efficiently download and install updates whenever necessary, so they could treat desktop software like a webapp. And then instead of having to coordinate hundreds of man-years of work, they can have small independent teams that crank out a feature, release it, see if the feature works well, and back it out if necessary. The best way to deal with an O(N!) problem is to keep N small.
    - robryan 17y ago
      Their worlds apart though, enterprise would be bringing in a lot of the money on Office, they'd want something they can roll out and only periodically patch, they want something they can rely upon from day one. Chrome is a free product that already achieves it's main aims, if chrome was a $200 browser or something I'd imagine it would have to conform to the big release idea to.
      - nostrademons 17y ago
        Chrome got out of beta before GMail because Chrome has a bunch of OEM deals. I don't know the terms of those deals, but I imagine there's money changing hands, and that they are of strategic importance both for the OEMs and for Google: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10106174-62.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10106174-62.html There's some resistance to using auto-updating software in enterprises simply because it's not the way things have traditionally been done, but IT departments are warming up to it. The huge pain of doing a major upgrade and the constant security fiascos that come from using software that's 5 years out of date are a major incentive for departments to switch to a model where individual changes can be canaried and tested in isolation before bringing down the whole enterprise. Google Docs is certainly having some measure of success in the enterprise arena, despite being a webapp with this development model. And outside of Google, Salesforce.com has revolutionized their market with a webservice-based enterprise app.

raganwald 17y ago

Traditionally, program managers say "What" and "Why," project managers say "When," and development managers say "How" (which encompasses "Who"). I guess facility managers used to say "Where," but that's stretching things...

amichail 17y ago
Wouldn't development managers and developers resent having program managers around telling them what should be built?
- raganwald 17y ago
  Well, no. If you're a developer or development manager working 70-90 hours a week developing and/or managing other developers, when do you have time to evaluate the market, keep track of every single competitor and potential competitor? Do you run a spreadsheet loaded up with market data and demographics evaluating the potential revenue impact for all of the features you're thinking of including in the next release? And so on and so forth. Product management is a full-time job on a substantial product. It may be that in small start-ups people wear many hats and you don't need it as a separate function. But if your team ever gets to the point that you can justify a full-time development manager, your team probably needs someone else with nearly full-time product management responsibility. In addition to that, there are sometimes some benefits to separating product management from development management. Sometimes. Being a little divorced from the product's inner workings can provide a certain useful perspective. Hopefully, the product manager isn't wedded to the feature that a developer just spent three weeks building and can jettison it to ship on time :-)
  - amichail 17y ago
    You are thinking of what's best for the company, not the developers. For some people, development is only rewarding if they determine what to build.
    - rmaccloy 17y ago

ruff 17y ago

http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/12/16/504872.asp...