3 ms·

> 1. Check-in regularly > I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with Uuuuhhh

> 1. Check-in regularly > I followed my mentor’s advice and started to check-in at least every half day with each pair of engineers I was working with Uuuuhhh... If a PM did that with me when I have a lot of work to do it'd send me off the rails. This article seems more to be about "what I have done as a non-technical PM to reduce my own anxiety at the detriment of my team". It's hard to say without a lot of detail, but I think there's something disfunctional about the team or about how the project is structured in this example. How big are the tickets? It's common for a "user story" to take days or weeks; it can say something simple like "user can submit a form" but have a lot of big system dependencies that were not well thought out (a form system, a state system, a server component, etc). Instead, tasks must follow a technical logic (a form system first, state management after, etc) and engineers should be left to do their own thing, with minimal "checking". Something like BaseCamp's "Shape Up" [1] comes into mind, with a few bets every cycle. 1: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/ https://basecamp.com/shapeup/

nojvek 7y ago
I would pretty much quit if someone came and interrupted me in person twice a day to ask me how things are going? In my decade of experience i’ve usually seen new PMs be extremely anxious and paranoid about timelines. As they get more experience and they see more projects that go off the rails they understand the tech speak a bit and have laxer expectations. Sure we’ll be 2 weeks late, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. Don’t burn your engineers for a dumb deadline that makes little difference to the customer. There’s a reason we have kanban boards and sprint boards. How are things going? Look at the board. The tickets are updated. Any blockers? Read the slack channel. Only interrupt in person when shit is really on fire. But even for that, the monitoring software will page the opslead.

nojvek 7y ago

I would pretty much quit if someone came and interrupted me in person twice a day to ask me how things are going? In my decade of experience i’ve usually seen new PMs be extremely anxious and paranoid about timelines. As they get more experience and they see more projects that go off the rails they understand the tech speak a bit and have laxer expectations. Sure we’ll be 2 weeks late, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. Don’t burn your engineers for a dumb deadline that makes little difference to the customer. There’s a reason we have kanban boards and sprint boards. How are things going? Look at the board. The tickets are updated. Any blockers? Read the slack channel. Only interrupt in person when shit is really on fire. But even for that, the monitoring software will page the opslead.