How do you engage more with your devs?

[vladpodpoly]

I’m doing this for the first time (transitioned from the marketing world less than a year ago) so it’s fine as I am still learning. But there just isn’t a lot to do, which is unsettling because I was working 60+ hours a week in marketing and now I’m working about 30 hours a week and making nearly double. I’m just confused.

[MariaWilson]

Yah. I mean you’re lucky I guess. Can’t imagine that will continue. I definitely don’t know too many PMs with that gig.

Use your free time to “sharpen you saw” , plan your upwards move and generally improving your worth. It’s a great position to be in and take the most out of it. Then as others have said try to get more responsibility or maybe move somewhere else

[EvaRichardson]

To directly answer the question, how do you get more involved for work that’s in production/development:

• User testing:
  Once you have an item in QA, line up some interviews with customers, create questions around your original idea, and get them to run through the prototype or feature to see how the solution created serves the brief, does it completely solve the issue, does it partly solve the issue, or did it miss the mark completely? This will give you a chance to up the acceptance criteria prior to releasing so the devs aren’t spinning their wheels releasing stuff that isn’t hitting. This is something that is totally in your domain as a PM that you can do.

• Regression Mapping:
  This is certainly QA but it helps you understand all the touchpoints of the feature and get a feel through the user flow to see if everything working the way you would want as the visionary in the team.

But ultimately, it’s your job to surface weak points in the product, look at new markets, understand your customers every need, and beat your competitor’s products, not to get stuck in the operations of development.

Have fun!

[NaomiNwosu]

I think a lot of what people here are saying about owning vision and strategy more is correct. It seems like your organisation is very overstaffed. Maybe you can get out and talk to users and customers more to offer some insights back up the chain (if they aren’t doing that already)?

As far as involvement with Devs, I’d say your role can be to get involved in helping them focus on what is important/valuable. Often people can get a bit lost creating some grand design that does all the things, when something simple will solve the users’ problems. This can go a long way to accelerating development.

[ChristieDook]

Find out which open-source libraries are the most useful to your team and contribute your 20% time (if your company doesn’t have this, you as PM can push for it) to helping one of them.

1. It will give you a better understanding of the technology involved in your product
2. You’ll get Dev respect
3. Most open-source projects need serious PM help
4. It indirectly helps your product

Look at it this way: probably a huge percentage of your product’s codebase is being built by devs that aren’t at your company, and without a PM.

[FelipeRibeiro]

I think you have a few things you could grow in:

1. Process wise, you’re there to unblock stuff sure day to day but overall are there significant delays in receiving clarity from other departments, or waiting on an environment, (can you improve delays, lags usually with external teams/resources lol)

2. Morale wise, you are also there to keep them inspired, motivated and interested! (As silly as it is,) weekly praise, true 'lessons learned ’ but also > ‘wins’

3. Eventually your team will come up with larger scope ideas that you will eventually need to take business (whether it’s for the customer, or usually it’s tech debt based… i.e., we really need to upgrade to xyz API and restructure the billing model to include 3 tables, etc. which is a long time) … especially because you don’t own the scope (I’m sorry) you will have to fight ten times harder for the things (well your team needs to do their job!).

So, there are some things you can also get that benefit the customer (creatively argued for ROI lol) that will kill two birds with one stone and will allow for growth/trust between you and the people making decisions.

[CarolynMiles]

I’ve been in your position and actually you’ll find the more hands off you are, once a ticket goes into a sprint, the better. Spend more time analyzing data, understanding the customer and planning ahead.

Your role is to be the business and customer representative. Be an expert in that and let the Devs be experts in implementing.