Project managers! Holy soft! Look at that energy!

What kind of things such a creature do? Here’s my bet:

• communicate! communicate!
• understand stuff (mandatory)
• set goal, set the path – have a discussion – and then shut up. Let the team resolve and get excited.
• visualize and explore new vistas
• ask to understand, if you don’t. It’s ok to ask, really. Don’t pawn uncertainties. Agile method is all about sharing uncertainties and learning.
• do stuff that makes people independent and lets them fulfill their role with ambition and success!
• coach, mentor people
• back up, ensure the project viability
• explain how things are made
• weigh in on factors of decisions within the architecture
• have clear-set goals for all developers and other productive project stakeholders
• manage the backlog (‘grooming‘)
• do roadmapping with project lead, if you are not the project lead as well
• remove obstacles of a beautifully shaped progress in Kanban metrics

By the way, Roadmapping and keeping a working, neat backlog should definitely be a different thing. Things in Roadmap should be a bit higher level overviews of what kind of features in general the software will have. As a Roadmap item is taken to production, it becomes a Backlog item.

Happy projects!