• john garrish
It's not a launch, it's a lifestyle
If you know me you know I will rail endlessly about the difference between PROJECT management and PRODUCT management.
But today I was contemplating the places where project management is really needed. Projects where you have a defined beginning, middle, and end. Critical paths matter. Dependencies matter. Sequencing matters. The whole nine.
When you see people who are good at project management it is a sight to behold. There’s an art to it. The person who can hold the full picture in their head, see the bottleneck before it happens, and move the pieces around before anyone else even realizes there’s a problem. That person is gold.
I am concluding that in the modern software company, a lot of people think that “project management” is “the person who sets up the meeting and takes the notes.” It just couldn’t be further from the truth. If that is project management in your company, I’m sorry. Truly, I feel for you.
The plan is not the point
No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.
Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke said that in the 1800 and Eisenhower rephrased it as “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” It has been variously attributed to Napoleon, Patton, and more recently, Mike Tyson - or, that is, anyone and everyone who ever watched a masterpiece of a plan disintegrate on contact with reality.
The point is not the plan. The point is the PLANNING. The process of thinking through what could go wrong, who needs to be where, what happens if the first thing fails.
The Green Berets are a great example, of many great examples from the military.
From the MDMP (emphasis added):
All planning is based on imperfect knowledge and assumptions about the future. Planning cannot predict exactly what the effects of the operation will be, how enemies will behave, or how civilians will respond to the friendly force or the enemy. Nonetheless, the understanding and learning that occur during the planning process have great value.
To be clear - SF doesn’t do this because they think the plan will survive. They do it because the planning process gives every team member enough context to improvise when things go sideways. And things always go sideways.
The lifestyle
What separates the great project managers from meeting schedulers is a bias for action - constantly iterating and building radical transparency. The plan is living.
Great project managers don’t wait until the end of the project to show you “the thing” - they maybe wait until the end of the day. They don’t share status, they share progress.
Sharing is caring. Not in the kindergarten sense - but in the “I respect you enough to keep you informed so you can do YOUR job” sense. It’s a hard lesson for a lot of people - but it’s actually really simple: you are not sharing for your boss, you are sharing for your teammates.
This is the part people get wrong all the time. Status updates aren’t upward reporting, they’re horizontal communication.
GitLab got this right
If you want to see what this looks like at scale, go check out GitLab’s Guide to All-Remote.
Their self-service philosophy is the part I love most. The idea is simple: ++assume the answer to your question already exists++. Search first. Ask second. And then when you get an answer to a question that wasn’t documented (and therefore searchable), document it so the next person doesn’t have to ask at all. They call it “paying it forward.” Every answer you write down is a gift to every future teammate who will have the same question.
The process is not the thing
A lot of companies treat the ACT of project management as the goal. Set up a spreadsheet, track the milestones, check the boxes, report the status. They are missing the point entirely.
The real work is the daily discipline of sharing, iterating, and keeping everyone in the loop IN SERVICE OF THE GOAL.
Not because it’s on the checklist. But rather, because that’s how you actually get real, useful things accomplished.
Be good. J.