I have to balance my responsibilities as the company’s PM and the CTO while making important infrastructure decisions that will have a significant influence on the business.
Working with the UX designer, overseeing the front end and back-end dev team/running scrums, planning features, managing the CS team, occasionally taking calls from customers, responding to support tickets, etc., as well as providing guidance on the company’s focus, strategy, hiring, and trying to persuade them to raise money for more resourcing…
I spend the most of my day in productboard, gitlab, figma, freshdesk, and scratchtask.
Since I’ve been running my own companies for the past ten or so years, I had to do almost everything myself (because I’ve never had the money to hire others).
In addition to overseeing the development pipeline for the upcoming two releases while redesigning the database for half the day as we migrate to AWS, management keeps requesting me to perform “product manager jobs” like frequent customer calls.
I have no job description and frequently hear the statement “This task is part of the product manager role,” despite the fact that I can handle just fine with the salary I receive and the lack of equity.
Am I a fool for doing this, or should I just carry on with my duties as a PM as this is a regular practice? Since I’ve been running my own companies for the past ten or so years, I had to do almost everything myself (because I’ve never had the money to hire others).
– Marco Silva
Discussion
A] In my opinion, you should think about leaving if your mental health is very important to you (depending, of course, on how “okay” the pay is).
I’m mostly concentrating on what I consider to be actual PM tasks. Leadership dismisses busy work or job that they don’t want to complete in my way by saying that it is a component of what PMs “should do.” The founders, who aren’t particularly tech-savvy, continually requesting me to speak for them in engineering meetings and, when the engineering team pushes back, to “stop defending the engineering team.” Yikes.
On top of that, they claim they are trying to make the product “feature-rich” before we can identify any consumer requirement from our studies, and they overburden our roadmap with product bloat. I’ve only been here for 4 months and am already considering moving on to a more established organization with duties that are a little more clearly defined.
Is it a part of the startup process? Absolutely yes, but part of it is culture, which won’t change even when a company expands or has more resources.
– Bobby Duncan
B] Wow. It was a very appalling display of poor leadership to place you in this precarious predicament.
Here, I’ll add one more perspective. Let something go wrong, ideally anything technical. Given how busy you are, I doubt they could even want to fire you. And if this fails, management will learn that they need to reorganize using engineering resources.
I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but I believe that given enough time, something will fail. I would want that failure if you plan to stick around to be something you can control or be aware of now rather than later.
– Flavia Bergstein
C] It sounds like you have a lot on your plate and are taking on a wide range of responsibilities as both the PM and CTO of your company. It’s commendable that you are able to handle all of these tasks, but it’s important to ensure that you are not overextending yourself and compromising your ability to perform your job effectively.
While it’s not uncommon for individuals in leadership positions to take on multiple roles and responsibilities, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of your job description and the expectations set by your employer. If you feel that you are being asked to perform tasks outside of your role as a PM and CTO, it’s important to have a conversation with your manager or HR representative to clarify your job responsibilities and ensure that they align with your current workload.
It’s also important to consider the long-term impact of taking on too many responsibilities.
While you may be able to handle the workload now, it’s possible that it may become unsustainable in the future, leading to burnout and reduced productivity. It’s essential to prioritize your tasks and delegate responsibilities where possible to ensure that you are able to focus on your core job functions and maintain a healthy work-life balance.
We are three of us, studied computer engineering together. I did complete an accelerator, so I am familiar with the fundamentals of businesses as well as financial forecasting and modelling. The other two are more focused on the making the prototype. So now I’m thinking whether I should add a business background cofounder, or will I alone be enough? Of course, I still have a lot to learn, and I am learning. Or should we later hire someone who has a business background.
I only want someone to be a cofounder if they are making a major contribution, and at this time, I genuinely believe a cofounder with a business background won’t be all that helpful, but they will increase the diversity and credibility of our team.
I’d like to know about your experiences.
– Maria Wilson
Discussion
A] As a graduate of both economics and engineering who later worked in management consulting and launched a firm that was bought, I can attest that anyone majoring in “business” with less than ten years’ experience or without a track record of success is worth less than a toilet.
The only advantages a business person has are their lack of guilt and their ability to drink. You won’t have any trouble selling if you can master both.
If however, if you experience large amounts of shame and embarrassment when you ask for boat loads of money that you know you’re not entitled to, then yes you need someone with business experience.
Sales is the only thing that matters in the first year. Your startup is a time waster if no one is buying.
– Mario Romero
B] Someone who has scaled and sold startups in your industry is, in my opinion, more crucial than someone with a business background. You’ve covered a lot of technical ground and provided some basic starting guidance, but you still need someone who has been through the ups and downs and has a natural intuition for what lies ahead.
– Felipe Ribeiro
C] As the “business” founder of my start-up I don’t think it is necessary but it is helpful. My opinion is that you need to have someone selling your product before it is ready and the likely trap for a team of 3 engineers will be the inclination to keep building “until it is ready”.
If you’re not talking to your potential customers, you’re not going to really understand what “ready” means. Orient your thinking that “ready” means someone will pay for it, not that it has all the features the co-founders can dream up.
I’m working on a significant project to migrate apps from on-premises to the cloud, which requires technical reworking of the programs. The business functionality of these apps has not changed at all. How might the epics appear? In the end, they ought to concentrate on the business value, right? However, every one of our stories will be highly technical, involving things like utilizing Gradle rather than maven and updating Java versions, etc.
– Felipe Ribeiro
Discussion
A] Begin by creating a crosswalk with your lead engineer to identify your on-premises equipment requirements and specifications, as well as what you need from the cloud.
Find out if there are any current issues you can address in the cloud by working with the team. Any database, backup, or autoscaling requirements.
Make sure you collaborate with the team to optimize your branching and release strategies, CI/CD runway, etc.
Work on learning application optimizations and other things as mentioned above.
Using DNS urls and other networking tools, plan your relocation.
Inform your neighborhood and key stakeholders. IE created a communication strategy. Prepare your downtime communications, relocate everything, and test it all so you only need to repoint the cloud. Voila.
– Bobby Duncan
B] In this scenario, the epics would focus on the overall goals and objectives of the migration project, which may include improving scalability, reducing costs, enhancing security, and increasing performance. The epics should also consider the timeline for the migration project, the resources required, and any potential risks or challenges that may arise.
As the stories for this project will be very technical, it may be more appropriate to create epics that focus on the technical requirements and tasks that need to be completed. These could include things like:
Refactoring applications to be cloud-native
Migrating data to the cloud
Upgrading server infrastructure
Re-platforming applications
Updating security protocols and policies
Each epic should have a clear business justification and explain how it will contribute to achieving the overall goals of the project. For example, upgrading the server infrastructure could help improve application performance and reduce costs, while updating security protocols could help enhance data protection and reduce the risk of security breaches.
To sum it up, while the stories for a cloud migration project may be very technical, the epics should still focus on the business value and objectives of the project. By framing the epics in this way, stakeholders will better understand the purpose of the project and the value that it will bring to the organization.
– Dhiraj Mehta
C] I’ve worked on projects like this before. I wouldn’t worry too much about the appearance of your epics or stories. Refactoring or moving tech stacks, as you indicated, mostly benefits customers through lower costs, increased availability, and occasionally quicker development durations.
In my opinion, projects like these require project management of the engineering effort rather than actual “product” work. Actually, before you get engaged or consider switching to another project or product while the migration effort is underway, I’d advise you to consider if you even need to.
Most PMs realize that defining a compelling vision for their product is a core responsibility of their role. But what most get wrong is thinking they can simply get away with defining a simple vision statement, those that do just that rarely find that their team is inspired or highly aligned on the future direction of the product. That’s because in summarizing the entirety of the vision in a short and pithy vision statement, so much of the important context around it is lost.
Before creating a product roadmap, we must first have a product strategy. Before having product strategies, we must first identify the objectives. A strategy is a series of actions organized to achieve a specific objective. While this may seem simple, it is not always easy to achieve in the workplace. Before proposing a solution, we must know what problem we are trying to solve. Otherwise, we may be stuck and don’t know if the project is making progress or addressing the real problem.
The article also doesn’t dwell on different applications of ML. It assumes that the PM or a business leader has identified an application and wants to apply ML to it. I rather emphasize that finding a “real” problem is one of the most critical tasks for a PM in a Machine Learning project.
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