How to dream of being a translator, and become a Project Manager and be happy

When I graduated from the technical lyceum with a gold medal at the end of the 2000s, “entering IT” was not yet mainstream in Kazakhstan. I dreamed of becoming a criminologist or translator. But first it turned out that a criminologist should not faint at the sight of blood. Then it became clear that the rules for passing exams in Kazakhstan only allowed me to become an electrical engineer. Suddenly I had to come up with a third, less extreme option.

At one of the leading technical universities in Siberia, the specialty “Applied Mathematics and Computer Science” was very nicely described to me. Here everything looked secure, because if I didn’t fall head over heels in love with science, there was still Plan B left – to become a programmer. This meant that it would always be possible to earn a piece of bread and butter, and I loved mathematics. That's what they decided on. Here it is necessary to say in advance that “you will work as managers” from the teachers sounded like an insult, not praise, but more on that later. Everything worked out successfully with my career as a scientist until Pre-Phd.

Plan B came in very handy when, with the echoes of the global crisis, grants were cut at universities. Another inner voice began to whisper: I want something new, real, about real life – and I started my career developer. It was exciting and uncomfortable at the same time. Firstly, I didn’t imagine that, with my own hands, after laboratory work I would be able to immediately write code in production, and secondly, even then the first bell rang – there is too little communication and you need to sit in one place for 8 hours.

After 5 years of working as a developer, becoming an epaulette Senior Software Engineer, I realized that it was time to change something. My heart told me that it was time to look for a new direction, but my lazy brain whispered: just change your job. I found a company with a remote work format and spent the whole day skiing, and in the evening I talked about research at daily events. After three months of such work, I was advised to start doing tasks or quit, and for the first time in my life I turned off the excellent student syndrome and quit what I didn’t like.

I had a desire to communicate with people, good discipline, a serious technical background and just a little love for management. The market looked at my entries in the work book and offered me a role Business/System Analyst followed by an upgrade to Business/System Analyst Lead. From that moment on, life began to sparkle with new colors. There was a fly in the ointment here too – my salary was reduced by 25–30%. Life became sadder and psychologically very pressing, but now I finally began to enjoy my work, despite a number of things that I wanted to change. The good news is that if you don't give up and really find your way, success will come even faster than you might expect.

Next position Product Owner and a 2.7-fold increase in wages occurred in about 2 years. Then there were new projects, teams, releases, and a month and a half ago I was surprised to find myself in the role Program Manager Happy PM(!). For some reason I remembered that when I was studying at the institute, the word “manager” was almost a dirty word in the academic community. And then I did not understand either the significance of this role or how “mine” it was.

Why I consider this role to be key, along with the Director of Product, is simple: practice has shown many times that for startups and their new products on the market, only a solution delivered on time is of value. The solution may not be ideal, but it is a feature in production that already satisfies the user’s need and brings money to the company. The main thing is that the solution must be safe. Perhaps the market will accept it this way for many years, and nothing will have to be redone at all. It may turn out that a rework is needed, but now based on feedback from real customers, and not ideas about the ideal from books.

Project/Program Manager is a psychologist, negotiator, provider of various resources, planner and organizer of key meetings and acquaintances. Project/Program Manager is 90% about working and communicating with people, a lot of them and with very different people, about the ability to negotiate, seek compromises, ask for help and help others, and the most difficult thing is to learn to trust the team so as not to slide into micro- management. Removing people from a team/project can also be emotionally difficult at the moment for both the Project/Program Manager and the team. But what a pleasure and joy it is to feel after a while that difficult decisions turned out to be correct!

Can a project be successful without a dedicated Project role? Yes, it can, if the project is small, and this role is reduced and/or shared between other members of a small development team or is performed by Dev/Team Lead. It seems that this is exactly the structure of the team Telegram told Pavel Durov in his recent interview journalist Tucker Carlson. Large projects, where 3-5 or more teams are simultaneously working on different heavy products, in my opinion, will not be able to move forward effectively.

If someone wants to start a career as a Project Manager, then most likely your path will begin with a Business Analyst or, skipping steps 6 and 12, with an Assistant/Junior Project Manager. Courses for beginner Project Managers are also offered by GoogleAnd IBM, but having real experience as a Project Manager for at least 3 years, you can tell even more. The book Mastering the Requirements process (Getting requirements right) by Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson helped me systematize my thoughts and take a broader look at projects at the beginning of my career.

My career path, according to the scheme, looks like this: 1 > 5 > 7 > 13 > 14. There are 2 steps left to the coveted Chief role. Sometimes it seems to me that the Developer stage could have been skipped, but then it might not have been possible to understand what was definitely not right for me. And the IT world also loves to be spoken to in its language, and this knowledge best comes to one’s head through one’s hands.

If anyone knows how to become a Chief Operating Officer in 3 years, tell me, I will definitely check and write what came of it.