
Ask HN: How does project management work in your small / tiny startup? - akor
For some context I work for a tiny startup where I&#x27;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 &quot;correct&quot; solution intuitively.  We&#x27;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&#x27;t deal with clients my &quot;correct&quot; solution on first pass frequently diverges from what the owner &#x2F; 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 &quot;marketing&quot; 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 &amp; 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&#x27;t really have the budget to hire another tech person and have tried outsourcing work which resulted in almost exclusively terrible &#x2F; sub-par results (which was partly on us).  I also am not clear I&#x27;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 &quot;correct&quot; 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&#x27;d like to grow as a person and think this is an opportunity for just that.  I&#x27;m just not sure how to turn the tide in the direction I want.  Anyway TIA.
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muzani
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.

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jackgolding
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.

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twunde
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

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PeOe
We use our own tool [https://zenkit.com](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.

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goatherders
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.

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mabynogy
Taskwarrior.

