Shipping Greatness

Chapter 4. How to Achieve Project Management Greatness on a Budget

AS YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT continues, you’ll need to stay on top of your project so that you can coordinate with other teams, plan the launch, and ensure that your dependencies are met. You need to handle this level of project management while also doing everything else. Unfortunately for your team, but fortunately for your paycheck, your time is at a premium. A team lead can rarely afford to build and maintain a sophisticated project model in Microsoft Project, and you will probably not be able to bring in part-time talent to work the night shift and “crash” the project (meaning, complete it in less time). If you want to be great at shipping software, you need bargain-basement project management.

I think understanding project management is sufficiently important that I ask about it during phone screen interviews for product managers. I ask, “How do you know if your product is going to ship on time?” To be fair, this is a trick question since nobody ever really knows if the product will ship on time. But you can estimate. A great answer to my question involves three low-cost tasks:

1. Build and maintain a simple schedule.

2. Track your bugs, watch your burndown, and calculate your zero bug bounce (ZBB) date.

3. Manage your dependencies carefully.

These three cheap tasks apply to waterfall or agile development processes. Each team you work with will want to manage their project differently, but these three tasks are generally ...