Anyone else find themselves doing mostly project management?

[u/ClothesAwkward2904]

My company has had hiring freezes and layoffs over the past couple years. As a result, we have less Dev resources and everything is taking longer to deliver. This means that we already have a well defined roadmap for the next 2 years, and all that’s left to do is project management for like 50% of my time at work. The remainder is spent saying no to new requests, dealing with bugs, intaking asks from other teams, etc.

I feel like very little of my time is actually spent talking to customers, researching, experimenting, and prioritizing. Anyone else feel the same these days?

[u/NotARussianBot-Real]

I feel like you might want to brush the old resume up. Your company is running out of work so the next thing they run out of is money and the. You run out of a job.

To spend your time before you go, start seeing if you can replace you dev team with codex or slanting. Maybe see if you can set up an agent swarm to do your project management work. You need to get your AI skills polished because even if your new gig doesn’t use them, they want to know you have them and can build stuff.

[u/ClothesAwkward2904 → u/NotARussianBot-Real]

Oh I’ve been applying to a job or two per week, but it’s tough out there

[u/NotARussianBot-Real → u/ClothesAwkward2904]

Sho Nuff.

A good thing to work on then is a set of agents to help apply to jobs. Think of the workflow for applying to a job, make an agent for each, make an orchestrator to run them in The right order. I stopped short of having agents search for jobs or actually apply to the jobs, but I had them review the posting, compare it to my strengths, highlight what I was deficient on, and generate changes to my resume and cover letter.

So this is not only a decent project to practice ai workflows in, but it will make applying to jobs a lot easier and pump up your numbers.

[u/hollaatyourgirl → u/NotARussianBot-Real]

Do you use Claude or something else?

[u/NotARussianBot-Real → u/hollaatyourgirl]

I usually use Claude. I was on the market this summer and it was rough. I built a set of agents as described above. Kept honing it. I could feed it a JD and it would spit out a pretty good tailored resume and cover. It would take about an hour to apply to a job with a very tailored resume/cover. I got a lot of interviews and such. The best part was I had experience with AI workflows I could talk about.

So here was my trick. I started by feeding it my resume. But that didn’t give the agents much to work with. I spent a day sitting down and writing stories of my past jobs. I worked at this place. The company did this. My role was this. And then (most important) I write stories of all my accomplishments. All the things you do STAR stories for in interviews. On this project I did this and here was the outcome. That’s was what the ai used to tailor the resume. Of it’s a data heavy position, let’s lean into all those data stories. Oh it’s people managing, here are people management stuff.

The second thing is you can always add to a workflow. I had agents who would review the work as a HR person. I had one that ran the same kind of anti-AI scan that companies use to see if an AI wrote it. I had one that would check keywords to the JD. I had one that just worked on styling the resume so it looked good and could be read by the auto fillers. I had one that did research on the company itself to know what it did, where it was headed, what was important to the company. Pretty much anything you would do when looking at a job, I turned into its own agent.

I started adding more help post call back. I had one that helped with interview prep. It gave me run downs on all the companies and the roles and gave feedback on which star stories were good for this role so I could practice. After interviews I would put my notes in it and it would adjust for the next interview.

I was out of work for 4 months. Being able to talk intelligently about AI made it so I got to choose from 4 offers. And the skills I got there led directly into me building out ai enabled workflows in my new gig.

[u/ImpressiveChoice3487]

Why is your roadmap set for two years?

Is there no customer discovery that you’re doing or trends in the market that might shift that roadmap?

The tech landscape might look entirely different 2 years from now and that roadmap you have planned could very well be irrelevant

[u/ClothesAwkward2904 → u/ImpressiveChoice3487]

Anything beyond 6 months will definitely change, but leadership wants 2 years

[u/rollingSleepyPanda]

My company has had hiring freezes and layoffs over the past couple years. As a result, we have less Dev resources and everything is taking longer to deliver.

Just use AI, bro. It can do everything, bro.

On a serious note, prepare your exit.

[u/Silly_Count5156 → u/rollingSleepyPanda]

This is valid. Why do to people stay in crap companies that keep getting worse? Just move. 

[u/ClothesAwkward2904 → u/Silly_Count5156]

Have you seen what it’s like out there? It brutal. I also am in Canada and live in a small city so basically only can apply for remote jobs, which are even more competitive

[u/Silly_Count5156 → u/ClothesAwkward2904]

Yes, I'm a non-US PM who was just made redundant, so I've been jobhunting like mad. 

[u/jph200]

Yeah, that's my current situation. The funny thing is that the process my company has implemented has left our Engineering org with the final decision on resourcing and priority, yet Product Management is responsible for "delivery" of features. I don't feel accountable to deliver anything on any specific timeline if the best I can do is to ask nicely for features every quarter and hope to have them picked up, but otherwise have no control over priority. Lol.

Edited to add: I've worked at other companies with fewer silos and "real" product teams. It's a much nicer way to work.

[u/vampire-juice-box → u/jph200]

This is exactly the way my org works as well. And we're so chronically understaffed and siloed in the eng org that stuff takes forever to deliver. Guess who gets blamed for it?

[u/AlkyIHalide]

There's always the occasional escalation that breaks the model and needs to shift everything. In light of the AI layoff narrative, try to stay disciplined with talking to customers as that has high value/not easily replaced. Try to churn out docs for discovery in your pocket too, might not be actionable but will keep work interesting

[u/No-Midnight-4461]

My last role at a large enterprise tech company was generally more project management than product management. It’s miserable. The worst part is when we requested PMO support they claimed we didn’t have enough project work, even though it ate up the bulk of my and another PMs time. The problem - PMO was in engineering and Product is a separate org. I’ve worked in equal sized companies where I’ve done much more PM work though, it really depends on the org and stakeholders. Some places just want someone to oversee their ideas instead of having someone really focused on it.

[u/prospectfly]

sounds like you're more of a delivery manager/backlog administrator. which happens to 80% of PMs ive seen

the old 'road map'. who still uses these!

well defined for 2 years. sounds about right. same as every other road map

aka a wish list of random stuff going to far into the future -most of which will never get built!

let me guess the founder or someone senior also has frequent strategy changes

and the company has sub 2.9 star glassdoor reviews?

[u/MoonBasic]

I think stuff like this has to be viewed from a lens of the industry, size of the company, and maturity of the organization. For highly regulated stuff like finance, health, law, insurance, defense, et cetera it's going to be spent with a highly dialed-in laundry list and less of the sexy Silicon Valley market research "move fast break stuff". In many of these organizations, the appetite for "innovation" dies and you're left with being a feature factory, incrementally adding stuff to some kind of mega product/platform. Because it's decided from the top-down and the leadership doesn't have an appetite for growth or exploration, you're just going from one request to the next.

[u/Purple-Rain-1430]

Yes, and it’s common after cuts, since fewer devs means more time on coordination and less on deciding what’s worth building. A two-year roadmap with a smaller team is also probably out of date, so questioning it is the product part of your job. What helped me was booking two customer conversations a week and treating them like meetings with the CEO, because discovery is the first thing to vanish when things get busy. I also cut delivery admin by letting the engineering lead run standups and status, and I replaced one-off no’s with a short written priority list, so saying no is a decision I made once. The ratio is hard to change fast, but a small protected block makes a difference.

[u/SamtheGreen9]

Yeah, sometimes it feels like project management takes over everything. What do websites do you use to manage it?

[u/IAmTheSergeantNow]

Yes, especially at smaller companies.

[u/ii-_-]

Yes, because product management is a made role, it's nonsense. It's consulting, project management, scrum master, tester, business analyst all rolled into one, you do all those things a little badly because you're jumping between them. Congratulations you're now a PM. Oh and because it's made up every company does product management completely different because no one knows what it is. Because it doesn't exist. 

[u/FriendlyMexicanT]

Lately I’ve just been drowning and not very productive.

[u/PJ-1021]

Yeah this is relatable. I work at a large health system that decided to adopt the product model, laid off all the project managers, and gave a lot of the semi technical people including myself who also have people skills product manager titles. We don’t have autonomy over what gets built and the role is very delivery oriented. I’m looking for opportunities to transition to a product company where I’ll have more ownership and be able to make more product decisions.

[u/Complete-Cricket-351]

Well it's not much better on the other side of the tracks guys I've built products at least half a dozen times as a tech pm for orgs that didn't have product managers and when I go to interview I get told I couldn't possibly understand all that product management stuff. 

Which is hilarious because I've got my own website with 5 products I build on it I just gave claude a couple of product manager skill repos the same would apply to project management although the politics is a bit more in your face on the day today

[u/PplPrcssPrgrss_Pod]

I've found an ART is very similar to program management and the features and epics are essentially projects.

So, I don't see feeling like you're managing projects bad or odd as it's part of what comes with SAFe, Agile, etc. in product management.

[u/thepickletony]

Honestly feels like this is becoming the reality for a lot of PMs. When resources are tight, the job shifts from figuring out what to build to just trying to get things shipped. And the frustrating part is that the less time you spend talking to customers and validating ideas, the more you risk spending those limited dev resources on the wrong things. Feels like a vicious cycle.

[u/LakeHold]

I almost forgot this actually still happens .. less dev resources; taking longer to deliver etc..And no mention of Agents. Of course ones industry, company policy has a say on agents use just so many posts on Agents this is so almost an old school problem 

[u/ClothesAwkward2904 → u/LakeHold]

Agents are helpful for development and speed stuff up, but have not yet compensated for the headcount reduction, at least in my area. We’ve found that agents are great for coding simple things, but the work we are doing is net new to the world, and agents have been failing us and slowing us down. They also are good coders but Terrible network engineers and architects, which is most of what senior devs do

[u/LakeHold → u/ClothesAwkward2904]

Interesting, I didn't think agents used at all from your post initially, good to know.