Wednesday, March 02, 2005 - 11:54 PM PST
This is an article I've had saved for a while. Chris Pratley talks about Starting out as a Program Manager:
About 4 weeks into the job, you start to feel strange. People keep asking you to decide things you don’t know anything about, as if you’re some kind of expert. You find yourself going to your peers for help more often than you feel comfortable with. You start to wonder if you can actually do this. You start to tank. Depending on your personality, you withdraw into your office to try to figure everything out by yourself without bothering anyone, or you start asking a broader range of people how to do things as soon as you hit an obstacle, to try to "spread the pain" and get results quickly.
I'm midway through my fourth week as a full-time PM. I do a little bit of both of the two options he mentions -- sometimes I do a lot of reading to try and avoid asking too many stupid questions, and sometimes I just ask away like a small child.
I'm not "tanking" or feeling any sense of despair, but I'm quickly realizing that as an intern, since I knew I would be on this team for less than 4 months (and had no idea if I'd be back), I didn't spend a lot of effort learning processes and procedures that weren't related to the work I was doing. So in some respects, I'm starting fresh now. Too many conversations are over my head and filled with TLAs (three letter acronyms). Before too much time passes, I really need to sit down for one-on-ones with people all over my team and learn about their respective roles and tools (dev, test, marketing, etc).
To be clear, yes, I'm still having a great time at work. It's just turning out to be as big a challenge as I was expecting, and I know I can do it. Good to know from Chris' article what I can expect over the next year.