Balancing technical knowledge with broader project management skills.
The Dual Role of a Tech-Savvy Project Manager
If you want to transition to a project manager from a software engineer, do you know what you are facing?
I had this idea about 3 years ago, and I was hesitant to make this decision because I worried about losing touch with the ever-evolving technological landscape. You might feel the need to stay up-to-date with the latest advancements to effectively manage and understand the technical aspects of the project.
Furthermore, the transition from a technical role to a managerial one can be challenging, as they need to shift their focus from hands-on technical tasks to overseeing the project’s overall progress. And you have to balance expectation from multiple stakeholders instead of the team members.
Most importantly, technical team members might be hesitant to accept a project manager’s leadership if they feel the manager lacks a deep understanding of their work. Building trust with the team becomes crucial for effective collaboration.
If you once had the same doubts in your mind, this article is totally for you. As an ever technical project manager, I would give you some usable tips to help you pass through the wall and move on. Even you have a technical background, you are doomed to be far away from technical decisions as time goes by. Instead, you have to deal with communication problems with technical awareness, not technical skills.
👉 Engage with Technical Team
As a project manager, you need technical awareness, instead of technical skills. Some engineers might think that a project manager should have technical skills, but that’s nonsense. In fact, the role should have sufficient technical concepts to enable communicate with technical experts.
Try to maintain open communication with the technical team members. Understand their challenges, discuss technical aspects, and encourage them to share their insights on project planning and execution.
👉 Empower Team Autonomy
As a project manager, you don’t want to see the team is always waiting for your decisions or detail documents. This would damage their autonomy to self-organize the work items. If you have the advantage of technical aspects, empower your team members to make technical decisions and encourage their creativity. Trust their expertise and support them when necessary.
👉 Apply Agile Principles
I know some people might argue a scrum master or a Kanban practitioner is different from a project manager. Yeah, I know they are different, but we could learn something useful from them and employ the coaching skill to boost the collaboration quality of a team.
For example, I once taught a team to use story points to estimate the workloads, and enable more conversations about what they are doing to increase the trust among a team. And then they were accustomed to selecting the most valuable, sufficient amount of product backlogs to deliver, in order to achieve the outcome.
Agile methodologies promote collaboration between the project manager and the development team. In fact, in my country there are less people knowing what a scrum master is. Usually the role is fixed with the project manager. That sounds uncomfortable for some agile evangelists, but that would be another path a software engineer could take if he wants to transition to PM roles.
If you take the above tips, I bet you are able to slowly transition to project manager roles with technical advantage, at least I did follow this way to achieve my career transition.
Are you still have similar thoughts in your mind and have no idea how to put it into practice? I would recommend you to have a talk with a mentor or anyone who have similar experience transitioning from a software engineer to a PM role.
By the way, now I am developing an online course about agile project management for those who’d like to transition to PM roles. So I provide an 1–1 free online consulting service for people who need help with their project management issues.
If needed, never hesitate to reserve a web call with me through the below link. Anyone who reserve for the call would be rewarded with a free material to improve your project management skills.
Let Me Help You
👉 Book now: https://calendly.com/uragilecoach/consulting
⚠️ Remember to send me a message through one of the social platforms (LinkedIn, IG, Twitter, Reddit) within 1 hour, otherwise the reservation might be canceled.
🎁 Anyone who reserves for the web call would be rewarded with a secret gift that helps you grow on project management skills.
If you acknowledge the value I share with you, do as below:
1. 👏 the article
2. subscribe me for latest contents
3. follow me on other platforms for further information
- IG: @ur_agile_coach
- Podcast: Agile Rocket
- Youtube: Your Agile Coach
- LinkedIn: Tsung-Hsiang Wu
- Twitter: @ur_agile_coach
