How to best integrate the Product Manager workflow with the Engineer Team?

Question

My team is using Shortcut (formely Clubhouse) for sometime now, and that is really all over the place. I've taken upon myself the resposability to organize that chaos.

One of the main complaints from out dev team, is that they have no visibility of the PM's taks and chores, and wanted to see how it connected with their work and day to day basis. So we decided to bring all our organization from a flimsy structured Trello to a new Shortcut inside Shortcut.

But i'm having some trouble theorizing how all that should work! Should the PM's and Devs share the same epic, creating different stories inside that? Our fear with that, is that the PM's task would "stain" the progress and velocity chart for the dev team when looking at the epic.

Our best idea yet is using Milestones for a big project and breaking that milestone in distinct epics for Devs and PM's. I don't really know if that makes any sense within agile, so I wanted to hear about more people struggling with that.

Answer 1

This question looks like an X/Y Problem. You are speaking of a possible solution, but what's the problem?

One of the main complaints from out dev team, is that they have no visibility of the PM's taks and chores, and wanted to see how it connected with their work and day to day basis.

Seems to me that the team is surprised by development tasks or why they are doing what they are doing. They want to know more about what's comming their way, so they want to see what the PM is doing. It also looks like there is some sort of handover involved in this, a separation of work that you want to keep so that you don't "stain" the progress of the development team with whatever the PM is doing.

You mention velocity, so you have iterations. But do you have refinement meetings? Do you have review meetings? Are there regular intervals when the PM and the team get together to discuss what to build next and how to improve the collaboration? Are enough information provided to developers during these encounters so that there is some common understanding of what's going on?

Developers probably don't care to see the PM's tasks, unless what the PM does (or doesn't do) affect their work negatively somehow.

So the developers want more transparency. The tool you use might help with bringing tasks to the surface to increase transparency and facilitate discussions around those tasks, but it doesn't address the underlying problem of why things are the way they are now and why you want to change them.

First you need to understand the problem, and then think of solutions (the one you mention or maybe others). And by you, I mean the entire team, not just you.

Answer 2

I don't think your dev team trying to understand the PM's activities is necessary. Because really, what are they trying to achieve. As a team using Agile, the responsibility of a PM is very much clear.

The PM's tasks won't affect your dev team's except in very rear occasions (I can tell you for sure with an example). You can use milestones to track your PM's progress on delivery, you can use the team's progress to track your PM's delivery and you can also assign tasks to PM using an PM tool. By using a tool, everyone knows what needs to be done and what is assigned to them, and progress of delivery can be measure as well.

Answer 3

Well, you may have to go back to the basic necessities which I believe you are missing out on.

If you include your Dev and necessary team members in your product backlog refinement, a lot of problems you mention are solved already. Everybody is well briefed on what is next and why they are doing it.

The next thing is to monitor the progress of the team using the milestones and monitor the progress of dev with any VMB tools of your choice.