Ask HN: How does project management work in your small / tiny startup?

7 points by akor 7 years ago | 7 comments

For some context I work for a tiny startup where I'm the only tech person. I am frequently handed a task that is unclearly defined and I work with the business owner to tease out the spec over time or am expected to come up with the "correct" solution intuitively. We're so small that everybody has too much work to do so I understand the necessity to just hand off the work but because I don't deal with clients my "correct" solution on first pass frequently diverges from what the owner / stakeholder is thinking. In addition the work sort of stacks up with the highest priority task being the one that has a client deadline attached or is a flashy "marketing" feature. There is no clear direction from the owner describing what should go next in the pipeline with a huge list of possible projects both small & large. The critical stuff is often left for me to work out outside of or in between the other requests but almost never has dedicated time to deal with it. We don't really have the budget to hire another tech person and have tried outsourcing work which resulted in almost exclusively terrible / sub-par results (which was partly on us). I also am not clear I'm given the tools to succeed in the sense that I feel like in a larger organization a CEO might tell a manager they want X feature and the manager is required to figure it out but they have more access to work out what a "correct" solution is (via access to stakeholder(s)). I realize there is a lot wrong with this picture and I should probably have already moved on but I'd like to grow as a person and think this is an opportunity for just that. I'm just not sure how to turn the tide in the direction I want. Anyway TIA.

muzani 7 years ago |

IMO, ideally a minimal tech team consists of two people: a full time programmer and a full time manager.

To use a gaming analogy, one is the DPS and one is the tank. The programmer moves the needle, makes things happen. But someone has to absorb all the attacks, so that they can do their magic.

The job of a programmer is to focus, deeply. The job of a manager is to handle all the meetings, always pick up calls, cut out unnecessary features.

Without a manager, you tend to take on more than you need to, because there's nobody around to reduce the number of things that need to be done, or estimate the timeline properly. Sometimes you need stuff from the client - API access, and so on. This is the manager's job to keep following up.

jackgolding 7 years ago | |

This is how I view managers, iteration managers etc. not only do they "steer the ship" (i.e. set the strategy) they are a shield from the rest of the business.

slipwalker 7 years ago | |

i wish i could upvote your comment several times.

twunde 7 years ago |

These are very common problems to have, even with large teams that include project managers. The first problem is prioritization. One way to deal with this is to do a weekly meeting to hash out the product roadmap and prioritization. If you do this well, the business will prioritize your work for you. To do this really well, you need a few things. First a rough sense of how much effort a project is. A day, a week? Second, the business should be estimating a rough impact on the business. A good question to ask is how much impact will this have on revenue? You should be working on things that have the biggest impact on revenue with the tiebreaker going to what's fastest to implement. Importantly you need to make it clear what your capacity is. My general rule of thumb is that you should be scheduling a maximum of 3 tasks to do each week.

Let's talk about the ill-defined tasks. The short-term solution is to say that every task requires at least one meeting to gather the requirements and design a solution. Until requirements are defined AND accepted by you, you can't schedule the work. You need acceptance criteria.

You're going to need buy-in from the business. Talk to your favorite manager/exec and discuss the problems you're having and your proposed solutions. They May have their own ideas and solutions to suggest. Trial it out and adjust the processes as necessary.

As a side note, you'll recognize some of these practices as agile practices. In factory terms, you're the bottleneck/constraint and you're trying to protect the constraint so that it's used as effectively as possible. Good luck

PeOe 7 years ago |

We use our own tool https://zenkit.com for project management and it works great. You need one person who overlooks the tasks and reorganizes it when there is something wrong. The person organizing the Tech Team (like you) should know at least the basics of the technical stuff you use or what you (can) do. Is some info missing, you can just ask other persons via @mentions. At Zenkit there is a rule, that we need to answer to such mentions as fast as possible. The whole work becomes easier because you don´t need to call someone and you and the whole team can see what everyone is up to. For all these tasks we use the kanban view (like to-do, in progress, done) and many companies set a rule, that one person should only have for example three tasks assigned to him on to-do.

goatherders 7 years ago |

I have tried trello, asana and google keep. And while they are useful the fact that my company is just me means I lean most on post it notes and a notebook. For example my entire sales pipeline is in color coordinated post it's on my office wall. And for now it works great.

mabynogy 7 years ago |

Taskwarrior.