Program Managers
This post on Chris Pratley’s blog about fledgling program managers got me thinking. After a year and a half’s experience of being a program manager, both for a legacy mission critical product and for its next generation replacement, I can relate to his observations.
It’s even worse when you’re inheriting a decade’s worth of patches, conflicting and short-sighted design decisions, customers with a large investment who absolutely can not tolerate problems with backwards compatibility and of course highly vocal demands to bring the product kicking and screaming into the contemporary era.
But it’s more than worth it in the end. You may have built up all your individual skills program management skills in other functions before this, but there’s no substitute for domain knowledge if you want to be effective. You do need project management, communication, decision making, risk analysis, problem solving and design skills, but becoming a subject matter expert is key. And that takes time.
Posted on March 19th, 2004 under Work • 
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