and when it sucks, devs get all credit
and when it sucks, devs get all credit
source: https://twitter.com/wagslane/status/1637910671781404673
image description:
a girl is smiling in front of the camera, not directly looking at it. in front of her is a big cake. the text on her reads, "PM showing off latest features"
just on the left and a little behind is a guy, out of focus, blankly staring at the cake. the text on him reads, "dev getting 0 credit"
Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.
I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.
Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won't be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.
Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D
Sounds like you are doing good PO work, keep at it!
Thank you, I'm sure trying. I got a good 30-35 years left in this, I'd rather not be miserable or make people miserable for the duration.
Glad to hear we're not the only ones with salespeople promising the moon and the stars to clients without asking first lol
I once had a sales-bro tell the client we'd "monitor the internet for X". That has remained one of the most important hammers for me to wield when discussions even start coming up. How the fuck does one "monitor the internet" to a degree that fits the clients interpretation of this phrase. Sales guy is still with us and a good lad, he owns that mistake. But fuck was it ever crazy.
Yes, it's fun when you make an estimate and planning for the lastest sale and it turned out the three weeks sold is three months of work. No, I don't care what you promised, it'll be ready in three months. Ask for an estimate before you make that promise next time.
We've decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. "End of Q3 or early Q4". When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we've made these changes, we've not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don't have clients who think we'll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we've anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.
There's a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can't keep what's promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don't get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.
The mind boggles.
I'm a PM in a different field (science stuff). If anyone asked me to present on behalf of the science team, I would say no. It's their work. Managing a team and timelines and budget does not mean I do the work. I think this is why when job searching I get a lot of interviews with dev and other tech. They just want competent managers. Some of them, anyway.
In swoops the project team to sign a contract with a software vendor without any architectural or Product input, then expects you to implement changes for whatever the software does and however it works. They do not know.