My First Project as a PM.

So there I was, on a random Saturday catching up with an old friend and then he randomly mentions that he was about to turn down a project because he didn’t have the time to manage it and I casually asked him to let me handle it since I’ve been reading about Product Management for a while and was up to the task. He said yes and that was it, I had a project to manage.

Starting out this project was really exciting for me as it was the first time I got to put all the things I had learnt the past few months into practice, and believe me I was super excited about it, it was all I could think about as I couldn’t just wait to start.

First things first I had a meeting with the stakeholders and we discussed about the timelines, scope and every other thing involved in making the project a reality. The company wanted a beautiful website and I had to make sure everyone and everything was in order to make this project a reality.

I started out by having a meeting with the team that was to build this website, where we talked about timelines, tasks and standup. I created a Project roadmap with the help of my team as they needed to be involved in the process so everyone would be aware of the timelines involved and sent this to the relevant stakeholders.

I woke up the next day feeling super pumped and excited because I had no idea how the following weeks were going to be. I worked hand in hand with the project owner to assign tasks on Jira to the designer and developers. I then worked with the designer to create beautiful designs for the project but this was a war on it’s own as we couldn’t agree on a particular design and we ended up wasting a lot of time on it before we eventually sent the top two to the client for approval. At this point we were already behind schedule and it felt like I was going to fail because I had assured the stakeholders that we would definitely meet up with the proposed time.

At this point, I was lowkey panicking. I didn’t want to put pressure on my team and end up getting subpar work and I also didn’t want to disappoint the Project Owner, this was my first chance to prove myself and I was determined to make it work. So there I was stuck at an impasse, not knowing which way to go, I decided to support my team in the best way I could and let everything flow.

A few weeks later, we were done and it was time for the demo with the stakeholders. I conducted User Acceptance Testing almost three times that morning just to make sure every single thing worked fine. We had a demo and then guess what happened, a few pages stopped working. You can imagine the horror when this happened, I nearly cried as at that point I felt like a failure and it made me look incompetent. I did some damage control and rescheduled another meeting.

At this point you’re probably wondering what else could go wrong, well the designer and the developers got into an argument because the designer felt that the developers were not accurately representing her designs and they stopped speaking to each other. I immediately went from damage control to conflict resolution, I must say it was a learning point for me as I tried my best to be non-partial and get them both on track. My mentor, Victor Olomo had mentioned the “Compliment Sandwich” strategy to me and I made sure I implemented it whenever I discussed or had to give feedback to the team.

We managed to finish the project, had another demo and the client was thoroughly satisfied with the new outcome. It was an exciting experience for me as this was my first time managing a tech team, dealing with timelines and also handling correspondence with stakeholders. I made a lot of mistakes and I also learnt a lot of things along the way. This was my first experience as a Product Manager.