A great project manager is
some funky combination of EMT, ninja, and jazz musician. An EMT who can show up on a
scene that's full of chaos, figure out what
needs to happen now, triage all of the things on site, and then develop a
plan of action while also participating
in that action. A ninja, because you have to be stealth about how you go about
influencing other people. Overt action or pushing people too hard isn't necessarily
received well. A jazz musician,
particularly a jazz drummer, who keeps a steady beat as a lot of things are
happening around you. On a team, you're
going to be surrounded by a bunch of talented people. A trombone player, a bass player, a trumpet player, a pianist, and you, keeping the beat and making sure that
everybody is working in time. I spend most of my days
with my product and engineering counterparts
talking a lot about strategy, updating status to
key stakeholders, and trying to figure out what
comes next for our product. Some things about
my job never change from this day to
my very first day. The fact that I communicate with a lot of people in a day, a lot of different
types of people, from engineers to product
managers to partnerships, to sales and marketing, all of that's the same. The biggest difference is the number of people
that I communicate with, and the complexity of
the topics I cover. The most important thing
for you to keep in mind is staying organized. The more organized you
are in your actions, the more organized your team is in their thinking
and their actions. What I do to stay organized
is lists, all day long. I have post-it notes, I have electronic lists, I have lists in e-mails, and those lists
help me stay on top of what actions
need to happen now, what actions need to happen next, and which I can put off
for a few more days. I do use lists to
help manage my time. I think one of the
things my lists are most important for is making sure I know what
needs to be done today. Then, once my list is made and I'm sure of what needs
to be done today, I budget time for those things. A stand-up is a quick meeting, usually at the start of the day, but you can have
them at any time. My stand-ups usually happened in the morning around
9:30 or 10:00 o'clock, depending on when the
engineering team got in. They lasted for about 15 minutes so that we were clear on what had gotten done the day
before and what was on the docket
to get done today. Then we usually checked in again quickly around lunch to
make sure that people were still on track or ran into any technical issues that might require a longer time
to finish the task. I think the thing that makes
me a great project manager is a bias to action
and resilience. One of my favorite phrases, is pick it and stick it. In part because I think
it's important to make a decision to
get yourself unstuck, to follow through on that action, learn some things
and decide to take a new action once you've
learned something. The latter half of
that is resilience. I'm resilient and my
teams are resilient. If we've taken a bad action, we've learned that we can learn and change our mind
with new information. I'm Elita, a Senior Engineering Program
Manager at Google.