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Any fellow Product Managers out there with fun stories to tell about working with developers who vehemently refuse to cut benign architectural corners to shave weeks off the ETA on a business-critical feature? Any developers out there with stories about working with product managers who sit in their ivory tower, demand convoluted features with impossible timelines, and act like Steve Jobs with low blood sugar when you propose a simpler implementation that doesn't compromise the user experience? Talk about managing products or managing Product Managers here! 
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Oct 5, 2017 05:44
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Content: I loathe traditional Agile user story syntax; when our team switched from waterfall to Agile a few years ago, all of our tickets were titled in accordance with scripture, and it was infuriatingly difficult to parse through a sprint/backlog full of tens/hundreds of tickets that all read like "As a user I want [awkwardly-phrased description of feature]". So a few sprints into our Agile foray, I just started naming tickets like: Improve pageload speed to <4 seconds instead of: As a User, I want the application to load in under 4 seconds so that I don't think the application has crashed Multiple Dev and QA folks independently thanked me for doing this, but the team's project manager, who is a slavish devotee to traditional Agile process (he has "certified scrum master" on his resume), hated it so much that he still snipes at me about it, years later. This is despite the fact that he doesn't bat an eyelash when the team team habitually inflates their story point estimation methodology to create the illusion of ever-increasingly velocity (I don't give a poo poo; I know who does work, and things take as long as they take). Clearly, I'm not over it.
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Oct 5, 2017 05:48
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Seanzor posted:Content: I loathe traditional Agile user story syntax; when our team switched from waterfall to Agile a few years ago, all of our tickets were titled in accordance with scripture, and it was infuriatingly difficult to parse through a sprint/backlog full of tens/hundreds of tickets that all read like "As a user I want [awkwardly-phrased description of feature]". I realized the other day that I've come to loathe the "As a ____, I..." construction just in general and now I wonder if Agile is why.
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Oct 5, 2017 14:27
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The last large place I worked at was transitioning to Agile (and things like tickets to track issues in general) so I helped them get the tracking system set up as part of my last hurrah. When "testing" the ticket system I left a bunch in there like "As a pervert I" and "As an aethiest I" and so on and so on. I found out somebody got in trouble a couple months after I left for not purging them, but bizarrely for a relatively innocent one which was "As a yacht owner I" (the owner of the company was a boating enthusiast).
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Oct 6, 2017 00:14
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There are two types of office chairs for two types of product managers. One folds at the slightest pressure, the other spins around in circles.
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Oct 6, 2017 05:34
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Seanzor posted:Multiple Dev and QA folks independently thanked me for doing this, but the team's project manager, who is a slavish devotee to traditional Agile process (he has "certified scrum master" on his resume), hated it so much that he still snipes at me about it, years later. This is despite the fact that he doesn't bat an eyelash when the team team habitually inflates their story point estimation methodology to create the illusion of ever-increasingly velocity (I don't give a poo poo; I know who does work, and things take as long as they take). Clearly, I'm not over it. People who religiously adhere to scrum loving weird. Evangelical christians, orthodox jews and jehovah's witnesses are generally more open-minded and flexible about religion than the scrum true believers.
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Oct 6, 2017 05:51
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:People who religiously adhere to scrum loving weird. Evangelical christians, orthodox jews and jehovah's witnesses are generally more open-minded and flexible about religion than the scrum true believers. Seems like people that value procedure over anything else, a bit like the IBM version of product development: We followed all the procedures correctly so now the product must be a success right?
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Oct 6, 2017 08:33
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The PMs where I work aren't too bad, but the scrum masters definitely are. We're trying to switch over to SAFe and I'm not looking forward to two full days of meetings. Plus they're sticklers about that stupid "As an X user I want to accomplish Y such that Z" wording in our user stories, but they also have us make user stories as granular as possible. We've actually started writing "As an X user, I want to accomplish Y such that the business requirements are satisfied." Real fuckin' useful, that wording. Oh and even though we do scrum, we still have to estimate everything and have fixed release dates. Very agile.
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Oct 6, 2017 15:51
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The "As a X I want Y so that Z" formulation is an attempt at a magical ritual to solve the problem of incredibly vague tickets that say to make some arbitrary change with no rational or enough details to figure out what should actually happen. I could see it maybe being useful as a training tool to get PMs used to the idea of actually saying what the goal of requested changes are, but that's about it.
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Oct 6, 2017 16:23
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I remember we used to have printouts of fake people (complete with stock photo headshots) who represented the various roles that we were building our stories for, in case we wanted to imagine the character better. They were hung on a wall nobody ever looked at that eventually got covered by a rolling whiteboard containing kanban cards. Each one took about a page and noted things like their family structure and hobbies.
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Oct 7, 2017 03:31
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I've seen UX/brand strategy people use those before, but writing user stories for them seems silly.
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Oct 7, 2017 03:59
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Protocol7 posted:The PMs where I work aren't too bad, but the scrum masters definitely are. We're trying to switch over to SAFe and I'm not looking forward to two full days of meetings. quote:Oh and even though we do scrum, we still have to estimate everything and have fixed release dates. Very agile.
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Oct 8, 2017 16:56
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I'm an operations manager trying to transition to a software PM role. Any suggestions of resources/books?
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Oct 8, 2017 23:03
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Our product manager and tech lead/scrum master are both great but the mention in the op of devs who just can't bring themselves to cut architectural corners to meet real world requirements is ringing seriously familiar...
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Oct 10, 2017 13:33
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Seanzor posted:Content: I loathe traditional Agile user story syntax; when our team switched from waterfall to Agile a few years ago, all of our tickets were titled in accordance with scripture, and it was infuriatingly difficult to parse through a sprint/backlog full of tens/hundreds of tickets that all read like "As a user I want [awkwardly-phrased description of feature]". I worked with a bunch of developers who loved this syntax. But our backlog was full of poo poo they'd written like "As a developer I want to rearchitect the history_archive_encrypt module so that it is better" or "as an operator I want to deploy version 1.6.1r16 to the QA environment". There wasn't any evil PM asking them to do it...  Actually, the PMs at that company were pretty good: any feature they requested always came with some kind of justification. Like, if they wanted a bigger button there would be a comment from the new UX person. Or if they wanted some new feature they'd have done a user study that indicated that people liked it. It was pretty cool. Then the next place I was at all the features were justified as "I think this would be good". It was not great for morale to look at the Google Analytics graphs showing that the feature we were enhancing was used by ZERO of our users.
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Oct 25, 2017 21:57
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I'm a developer and I usually get along better with my PM's than I do my fellow dev's. I find a lot of software guys will prattle forever about the philosophy about how software should be made and I think that 95% of the time it does not loving matter, just get that poo poo done. Agile has some cool takeaways but it takes a lot of effort to make it work and in general with that amount of effort any other method would work too.
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Oct 26, 2017 16:07
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Capri Sun Tzu posted:I'm a developer and I usually get along better with my PM's than I do my fellow dev's. I find a lot of software guys will prattle forever about the philosophy about how software should be made and I think that 95% of the time it does not loving matter, just get that poo poo done. I actually remember getting a lot of that when I was a new developer. Generally the people who talk about that every day are the frauds. Don't give them anything important to do.
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Oct 28, 2017 13:38
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Capri Sun Tzu posted:I'm a developer and I usually get along better with my PM's than I do my fellow dev's. I find a lot of software guys will prattle forever about the philosophy about how software should be made and I think that 95% of the time it does not loving matter, just get that poo poo done. I've tended to find the same. PMs and I get along. I suspect it comes from an attitude and communication style that isn't "UGH THIS IS DUMB" to "ok hey, so I have some concerns about this, but here are some solutions I can kind of propose, do any of these work for you?' Just like the relationship between Dev and QA doesn't need to be antagonistic and combative, I think the relationship between a PM and the team as a whole can be productive as well. **yes, some PMs are dumb business drones
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Nov 9, 2017 00:39
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My favorite was the PM that wrote most stories in the form of: As a <User> I Want <bleh> So that Money. "So That Money"
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Dec 2, 2017 15:35
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"I think the relationship between a PM and the team as a whole can be productive as well." -Cuntpunch
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Dec 2, 2017 20:19
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Capri Sun Tzu posted:I'm a developer and I usually get along better with my PM's than I do my fellow dev's. I find a lot of software guys will prattle forever about the philosophy about how software should be made and I think that 95% of the time it does not loving matter, just get that poo poo done. Counterpoint: It takes a lot of experience to know which 95% doesn't matter so you don't paint yourself into a corner with a bad design decision.
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Dec 2, 2017 23:59
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:People who religiously adhere to scrum loving weird. Evangelical christians, orthodox jews and jehovah's witnesses are generally more open-minded and flexible about religion than the scrum true believers. The problem is , Scrum and other Agile methods can be even worse when done half baked or pillaged for bits that make managers happy without the bits that make developers happy. Like, the other day I had one of the advertising people demand I have some crazy complicated feature done "in a week" . I told him its impossible without doing some fairly gnarly server side work first and he tried to shut me down saying "Spending time on architecture is un-agile, just implement it! If its not done in a sprint its not a deliverable. I ended up telling him to gently caress off. Unfortunately this sort of thing is why our back ends now a total clusterfuck. Never given time to actually do it right. Never given time to go back and fix things, and when there is time, its all putting out fires caused by the poo poo pushed on us from above. The irony is, if we where given time to get the foundations right, all this other poo poo they want to mash on would be straightforward and elegant to implement. Also: gently caress rails with a rusty fork.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:06
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duck monster posted:The problem is , Scrum and other Agile methods can be even worse when done half baked or pillaged for bits that make managers happy without the bits that make developers happy. Who has your back there? I know that where I am and have been the only answer that should fly is, “You prioritize the backlog, we’ll deliver based on the velocity of it.” Tasks get more complex the worse the architecture is. Though for my new project we’re just starting to get tech debt tasks onto the sprint board so we’ll see how that goes.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:19
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Hughlander posted:Who has your back there? I know that where I am and have been the only answer that should fly is, “You prioritize the backlog, we’ll deliver based on the velocity of it.” Tasks get more complex the worse the architecture is. Though for my new project we’re just starting to get tech debt tasks onto the sprint board so we’ll see how that goes. Oh the whole dev team agrees, but its a management thing. i'm open about my desire to burn the whole loving thing down and start again. Unfortunately, we're a telco, and theres a lot to burn down if we did.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:25
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