I'm not a fan of "Project Managers" in tech. This is why.

I've seen at least 3 tech org's with "Project managers" and probably 15+ without. The ones that had them were the slowest to get things out and least efficient.

So the larger a tech team gets the stronger the tendency typically is to hire on “Project managers”.

What are “Project Managers” in tech?

These are people whose sole job is to keep projects on track and communicate upwards timelines, blockers, etc.

Typically in smaller companies the product manager just does this. But what tends to happen as companies get larger is that there are more and more teams.

And complex projects require coordination of several or more teams.

So the project manager is the person that coordinates across teams and dependencies and maintains the ‘target live date’ until features are launched.

Plus project managers typically also take responsibility for almost all projects and ETA’s. They are like the extra body that sits in on sprint meetings with the product manager with the sole purpose of understanding whether this will impact key dates.

This is also the person that typically communicates regularly the ETA’s and changes to ETA’s to folks like the CTO or CEO.

In every org i’ve seen this the project management team reported into the CTO, but I can imagine sometimes they report into the CPO.

I’d first seen ‘Project managers’ in Lazada in 2015… the year before Jack Ma came

Project managers were a big thing in Lazada back in 2015-2017. I think the team was created in 2015 (the year after I joined) and was at its peak in 2016.

I had friends in that team and they were good, smart people. So this is in no way a slight on them. Rather only on that role in general.

In Lazada they grew from being a couple of people to being a team that was probably at least 10+ strong. They had a massive dashboard that they maintained in Jira with all the current ETA’s of all consumer-facing tech projects.

Luckily for the areas that I managed, Ops, Finance and Marketplace, we managed to keep them out as we managed a pretty tight ship and never felt the need. My PM’s did just fine manaing the eta’s and communicating to stakeholders.

Why I was not a fan of Project Managers in Lazada

In my opinion the transparency & efficiency of the tech team in the areas that didn’t have project managers (ie. the areas I covered) was just far better.

Because PM’s would own things end to end. And you wouldn’t have multiple people communicating sometimes conflicting things to the same business stakeholder.

The consumer-facing tech side which was rampant with project managers had tons of additional meetings and various types of updates.

All kinds of fancy Jira dashboards were conconcted by this project mgmt team, and showed to upper management.

At some point they also had a ton of leverage. Because the CEO was getting his updates on all his key projects from the head of project management.

And even business stakeholders were sometimes making new feature requests or prioritisation changes not to their product manager…. but rather to the project manager covering their area.

Looking back things just worked better at Lazada without Project Managers

In 2016 the CPO changed and a guy named Johnny Wong joined. And at some point he also assumed the role of CTO for all feature-related (ie. non-infra) products.

I can honestly say that I’m not a fan of Johnny Wong and chose to avoid him by focusing on leading product for Operations, which had been siphoned off into a separate org called “LEL” at the time and did not report to him.

But he did do a few things right. One of which was dismantling that whole project management mess on the consumer-facing tech side.

The whole team was let go or moved into other areas like product.

He made his product managers take full responsibility for their stakeholders and sticking to the timelines.

And what I saw and heard from both the business and tech side alike… was that things just worked much faster and simpler.

Ozon, a top 2 ecom player in Russia, was almost the same exact story

In 2018 I contracted for about 6 months for Ozon and on an interim basis was leading all of their operations, finance and marketplace product (about 60% of their tech scope).

I saw how they built up a very large project management team of 10+ and would sit in on the weekly meetings where the ETA’s were presented out and updates were made.

It was tedious and repetitive. Most people just played with their phone during these meetings.

And as with Lazada… for awhile this project management team started to gain a lot of leverage and business people started communicating their roadmap requests to them in some cases.

It started to feel like deja vu.

Then as quickly as it came…. a bit after I’d finished my contract I heard that the entire project management team was let go.

And that everyone let out a giant sigh of relief as it felt like a massive bureaucracy was lifted and things just moved faster.

BUT.. if you get rid of them it means that your product team needs to be organized

There’s an old saying that goes something like.. “You can get rid of the people but you cannot get rid of what they do.” And this very much holds.

When product managers manage their own projects they need to have tight project management skills. And teams need to be able to communicate well.

I always found this a massive challenge in JIRA and so i actually hate JIRA now. haha

Because when i discovered Clickup I realized just how easy things could be. Each product team can have its own folder in a space and its very easy to have visibility into other teams and manage dependencies.

Which is why I tell clients these days..

step 1: Get rid of Jira.

step 2: Adopt Clickup in the way I tell you.

step 3: Get rid of your project management function.

step 4: Teach your business folks to write their own clickup cards and have product managers run the process, but only focus their own time on the more complex features that should be documented (in something like Notion).

Voila!! You do this.. i guarantee you will save a boatload of money, time and headache!