aside
22 Aug 2011
It was just 1 hour before a mundane Monday was off that I got a mail from my feature dev owner with a bad news. She said that one of the key features I defined in spec could not be done because the related dev has not planned for it.
The first thing I did with my PM hat was to figure out the solution to it. So I asked him about giving me a SWAG of the dev cost. With this data in hand, I can ask the dev lead for extra resources for implementing it. Everybody will be happy. No big deal.
What interesting is then the cause of it. I thought it through on the commute and saw 2 reasons that life could have been even easier:
- I forgot to involve that dev who actually would implement the feature into dev review meeting. My assumption was that he was aware of it or at least would skim my spec. I was wrong.
- Even I didn’t include him in the meeting. He could still give me a hand, only if we had fair relationship. But the truth is I have been roaming around recently without really getting in touch with him for quite some time. Another big no-no if you are working in a company located in China, no matter where the headquarter is.
Lesson learned: I should have involve every dev who I know even he will only do code review to my review meeting. This is the key to have everybody agree on the spec and be on the same page. Never rely on offline talks. You still need a formal, open and transparent way to prioritize your sub features and allocate them to every single developer.
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