I was fortunate. Since my third year as an engineer, I got tons of opportunities to practice how to run projects.
Some of the projects need to build from scratch, some of the projects are urgent and some of the projects with large SPEC.
No matter which role you’re playing in the execution process, there are always a few keys that can help you to have the expected outcome. And as mentioned in the title, to build up your leadership.
Clarify the goal of the project
Before you start doing anything, please make sure to deeply figure out what kind of the purpose the project is trying to achieve.
Consider you’re doing engineering work or designing the UI/UX of the project, you’re going to make decisions while moving forward. Making decisions need reasons. And most of the time, the goal of the project could be the most important reason.
Try to answer a simple question, why you’re doing this project? To have models? to create APIs? to draw a cool window? — I guess not.
Because you would like to make to the goal of the project. To have the goal in mind or pin it onto your screen. Involve that in the discussion, the PR reviews.
This is not only helping you to convince people, and even being really helpful while choosing solutions. Try it, sincerely.
Communicate as a team
While you’re not doing things alone, there would always be discussions and arguing. That’s not news since the conflict of interest of different responsibilities. Going with plan A could lead to more tasks to assign to backends, and talking about plan B, the iOS team would have more tasks to handle.
Fighting for your own good is nothing wrong.
But before you start the conversation, keep this in mind, you’re a team.
The project will be a success only if you both succeed. If you do have more capacity and the plan is not leading to technical debt, then taking over more responsibility could be a good idea. On the other hand, you can also use this point to discuss with your team member, it would be more smooth for a team conversation compared with Backend VS iOS.
Remember, succeed as a team, and fail as a team.
Be the McDonald’s guy
Have you ever heard the McDonald’s Theory? A successfully executed project cannot leave without a series of discussions. It’s because everyone has their blind side, and with the help of the team, we can conquer it.
The key to having great questions or opinions is thinking. Think about the goal of the project. To get the result, what can be our stopper? is there a better way, or even, if that is a reasonable goal?
If you’re a master of project runner, you might have more opinions about the implementation detail, if not, then the “Goal-Questions” is always good to trigger the discussion.
Tips: You don't have to raise all discussions in the meeting, because that would be very time-consuming. You can either have those conversations on slack or daily chats with your team.Record your notes, project documentation does matter
Having the ability to find discussion records is the key to saving your time from back-and-forth communication. With the project’s progress, you’ll face multiple times that you need to recall the conclusion the team has made.
Also, that would be good for cross-team communication. The words in the file can provide confidence for you and the people not participating in the discussion.
Even after you finish the project, documentations are also crucial for operation and maintenance.
For the retro purpose, a complete note through the project gives the opportunities to improve the team from all the events.
The most important scenario is, avoiding you from saying “I don’t know” to those discussed cases.
Production factors
As we’re talking about the production projects, other than the goal of the project, these are a couple of factors that also matter for the final outcome:
- Operation: If there are enough breadcrumbs for troubleshooting? How easy to make changes if needed? etc.
- Performance
- Cost: Either technical costs like technical debt or financial costs.
As we mention in the very first place, keep these points in your mind and use it to help you make decisions and raise discussions.
Feel free to add items based on your environment or industry.
Conclusion
We all wish that we can produce the best product or project, I hope these points may at least give you some inspiration to build up your leadership or methodology for the project execution.
The key is always about thinking, if you keep thinking of every perspective with the correct mindset, I bet you’re doing really well right now!
If you’re learning how to do it, maybe just try these tips to see if it can help, at least that works great for me :)
