More than Project Managers

Dashdevs company has no Project managers. We don’t like the term projects. We love the products. However, there are no product owners either. We have extremely good Client engagement managers. It was a conscious decision not to hire PM/PO because the primary goal of the company is to create top-notch digital products. This ambition requires more skills in one person then just to be able to manage people. The Client engagement managers are procreators of the product, coaches and advocatesfor the Client, and the loud voice of the Clients product vision for the development team.

So, the list of my Department responsibilities:

1. Define the product:help to identify and develop the idea and vision of the new product concepts, perform benchmarking analysis and create wireframes/prototypes. We know basic UI/UX concepts and rules, because we are taught by the design department. Our team members are professional users of Sketch App, Marvel, InVision.
2. Communication with developers:we avoid a client spending hours with developers. Engagement manager can facilitate the technical meeting with the development teams and provide all the results to the Client.
3. Manage development process:from the first meeting, they control that development team understand the Product and choose the best solutions for the Client. Participation in tech meetings helps to keep abreast of the development progress.
4. Documentation management: prepare product description in understandable for the devs way, write user stories and perform task management in Jira.
5. Time management: we get estimates for the features/product, do risk analysis and control that implementation is done in time.
6. Resource management:my department members execute performance reviews and check that the appropriate resource is working on the project.
7. Planning of future implementation: we are planning product implementation for the future period.

Easy to say but hard to reach. Not so effortless to find such a person that’s why we have an intensive education program in the department. Usual developers and designers workshops, hold internal skill-ups on different tech topics, participation in conferences, reading and discussing video/books.

Overall 3 key components that determine all Client engagement managers are — discipline, readiness for self-improvement, passion for creation.