u/Still-Gold-6146

I'm 32 and just got fired from my first management position at an agency after 2 months. Before this position, I ran my own tech business for a couple of years and mostly worked as an IC. Around 6 ppl got assembled for this gig, everyone was kinda new.

The frustrating part is that the team was delivering results. The client was also very happy. The project I inherited mid-flight was already in rough shape when I joined, and I had to push a lot of decisions get things back on track because we needed to be functional for a couple of important events that served as our deadlines.

I cared a lot. Even though it was only a 10-week gig, I was doing 12+ hour days to get the product in order, aligning the engineering team and the client across two time zones, and handling everything else that came with it.

I was also dealing with a difficult high performer lead who was openly rude and one low performer team member who complained constantly (it was a guy who after 13 years working in corporate joined an agency gig for the first time in his life, so everything was new to him and he was having issues that I never seen ppl having), and I think I let that affect the way I managed everyone else.

In the end, they banded together and complained to the COO, who decided to knowingly dump a negative feedback bomb on me two days before my wedding, when I was already very busy preparing us for launch.

I didn't take it well. I pushed back hard. What was supposed to be a 30-minute feedback meeting turned into a 2-hour rant from me, and afterward I even sent him an A4-page rant explaining my side of everything. I guess that was the final nail in my coffin.

That said, I do agree with some of the criticism. I was probably too hard on people. I'm not here to argue that I was treated unfairly. I can see my mistakes.

But I've been replaying this over and over in my head all week, despite having a conversation with the CEO during my exit interview. He told me I did 90% of things well and mainly needed to improve the way I give and receive feedback. He even laughed about me clashing with the COO and joked that we should probably "clean our chakras" together.

It hurts a lot because I cared so much and even when deciding to go i to PM i thought Im gonna be better than my past managers, but no work life balance and stress got to me. I also feel stupid because it was a very well paid gig but I let my principles to get in a way. I keep wondering whether I'm just not cut out for management or whether this is simply one of those painful lessons that many first-time managers go through.

I'd appreciate any seasoned manager or even some mature fatherly advice at this point.

I'm 32 and just got fired from my first management position at an agency after 2 months. Before this position, I ran my own tech business for a couple of years and mostly worked as an IC.

The frustrating part is that the team was delivering results. The client was also very happy. The project I inherited mid-flight was already in rough shape when I joined, and I had to push a lot of decisions get things back on track because we needed to be functional for a couple of important events that served as our deadlines.

I cared a lot. Even though it was only a 10-week gig, I was doing 12+ hour days to get the product in order, aligning the engineering team and the client across two time zones, and handling everything else that came with it.

I was also dealing with a difficult high performer lead who was openly rude and a couple low performer team members who complained constantly for no good reason, and I think I let that affect the way I managed everyone else.

In the end, they banded together and complained to the COO, who decided to knowingly dump a negative feedback bomb on me two days before my wedding, when I was already very busy preparing us for launch.

I didn't take it well. I pushed back hard. What was supposed to be a 30-minute feedback meeting turned into a 2-hour rant from me, and afterward I even sent him an A4-page rant explaining my side of everything. I guess that was the final nail in my coffin.

That said, I do agree with some of the criticism. I was probably too hard on people. I'm not here to argue that I was treated unfairly. I can see my mistakes.

But I've been replaying this over and over in my head all week, despite having a conversation with the CEO during my exit interview. He told me I did 90% of things well and mainly needed to improve the way I give and receive feedback. He even laughed about me clashing with the COO and joked that we should probably "clean our chakras" together.

It hurts a lot because I cared so much and even when deciding to go i to PM i thought Im gonna be better than my past managers, but no work life balance and stress got to me. I also feel stupid because it was a very well paid gig but I let my principles to get in a way. I keep wondering whether I'm just not cut out for management or whether this is simply one of those painful lessons that many first-time managers go through.

I'd appreciate any seasoned manager or even some mature fatherly advice at this point.

I'm 32 and just got fired from my first management position at an agency after 2 months. Before this position, I ran my own tech business for a couple of years and mostly worked as an IC.

The frustrating part is that the team was delivering results. The client was also very happy. The project I inherited mid-flight was already in rough shape when I joined, and I had to push a lot of decisions get things back on track because we needed to be functional for a couple of important events that served as our deadlines.

I cared a lot. Even though it was only a 10-week gig, I was doing 12+ hour days to get the product in order, aligning the engineering team and the client across two time zones, and handling everything else that came with it.

I was also dealing with a difficult high performer lead who was openly rude and a couple low performer team members who complained constantly for no good reason, and I think I let that affect the way I managed everyone else.

In the end, they banded together and complained to the COO, who decided to knowingly dump a negative feedback bomb on me two days before my wedding, when I was already very busy preparing us for launch.

I didn't take it well. I pushed back hard. What was supposed to be a 30-minute feedback meeting turned into a 2-hour rant from me, and afterward I even sent him an A4-page rant explaining my side of everything. I guess that was the final nail in my coffin.

That said, I do agree with some of the criticism. I was probably too hard on people. I'm not here to argue that I was treated unfairly. I can see my mistakes.

But I've been replaying this over and over in my head all week, despite having a conversation with the CEO during my exit interview. He told me I did 90% of things well and mainly needed to improve the way I give and receive feedback. He even laughed about me clashing with the COO and joked that we should probably "clean our chakras" together.

It hurts a lot because I cared so much and even when deciding to go i to PM i thought Im gonna be better than my past managers, but no work life balance and stress got to me. I also feel stupid because it was a very well paid gig but I let my principles to get in a way. I keep wondering whether I'm just not cut out for management or whether this is simply one of those painful lessons that many first-time managers go through.

I'd appreciate any seasoned manager or even some mature fatherly advice at this point.

I'm 32 and just got fired from my first management position at an agency after 2 months. Before this position, I ran my own tech business for a couple of years and mostly worked as an IC.

The frustrating part is that the team was delivering results. The client was also very happy. The project I inherited mid-flight was already in rough shape when I joined, and I had to push a lot of decisions get things back on track because we needed to be functional for a couple of important events that served as our deadlines.

I cared a lot. Even though it was only a 10-week gig, I was doing 12+ hour days to get the product in order, aligning the engineering team and the client across two time zones, and handling everything else that came with it.

I was also dealing with a difficult high performer lead who was openly rude and a couple low performer team members who complained constantly for no good reason, and I think I let that affect the way I managed everyone else.

In the end, they banded together and complained to the COO, who decided to knowingly dump a negative feedback bomb on me two days before my wedding, when I was already very busy preparing us for launch.

I didn't take it well. I pushed back hard. What was supposed to be a 30-minute feedback meeting turned into a 2-hour rant from me, and afterward I even sent him an A4-page rant explaining my side of everything. I guess that was the final nail in my coffin.

That said, I do agree with some of the criticism. I was probably too hard on people. I'm not here to argue that I was treated unfairly. I can see my mistakes.

But I've been replaying this over and over in my head all week, despite having a conversation with the CEO during my exit interview. He told me I did 90% of things well and mainly needed to improve the way I give and receive feedback. He even laughed about me clashing with the COO and joked that we should probably "clean our chakras" together.

It hurts a lot because I cared so much and even when deciding to go i to PM i thought Im gonna be better than my past managers, but no work life balance and stress got to me. I also feel stupid because it was a very well paid gig but I let my principles to get in a way. I keep wondering whether I'm just not cut out for management or whether this is simply one of those painful lessons that many first-time managers go through.

I'd appreciate any seasoned manager or even some mature fatherly advice at this point.

I'm 32 and just got fired from my first management position at an agency after 2 months. Before this position, I ran my own tech business for a couple of years and mostly worked as an IC.

The frustrating part is that the team was delivering results. The client was also very happy. The project I inherited mid-flight was already in rough shape when I joined, and I had to push a lot of decisions get things back on track because we needed to be functional for a couple of important events that served as our deadlines.

I cared a lot. Even though it was only a 10-week gig, I was doing 12+ hour days to get the product in order, aligning the engineering team and the client across two time zones, and handling everything else that came with it.

I was also dealing with a difficult high performer lead who was openly rude and a couple low performer team members who complained constantly for no good reason, and I think I let that affect the way I managed everyone else.

In the end, they banded together and complained to the COO, who decided to knowingly dump a negative feedback bomb on me two days before my wedding, when I was already very busy preparing us for launch.

I didn't take it well. I pushed back hard. What was supposed to be a 30-minute feedback meeting turned into a 2-hour rant from me, and afterward I even sent him an A4-page rant explaining my side of everything. I guess that was the final nail in my coffin.

That said, I do agree with some of the criticism. I was probably too hard on people. I'm not here to argue that I was treated unfairly. I can see my mistakes.

But I've been replaying this over and over in my head all week, despite having a conversation with the CEO during my exit interview. He told me I did 90% of things well and mainly needed to improve the way I give and receive feedback. He even laughed about me clashing with the COO and joked that we should probably "clean our chakras" together.

It hurts a lot because I cared so much and even when deciding to go i to PM i thought Im gonna be better than my past managers, but no work life balance and stress got to me. I also feel stupid because it was a very well paid gig but I let my principles to get in a way. I keep wondering whether I'm just not cut out for management or whether this is simply one of those painful lessons that many first-time managers go through.

I'd appreciate any seasoned manager or even some mature fatherly advice at this point.

I'm 32 and just got fired from my first management position at an agency after 2 months. Before this position, I ran my own tech business for a couple of years and mostly worked as an IC.

The frustrating part is that the team was delivering results. The client was also very happy. The project I inherited mid-flight was already in rough shape when I joined, and I had to push a lot of decisions get things back on track because we needed to be functional for a couple of important events that served as our deadlines.

I cared a lot. Even though it was only a 10-week gig, I was doing 12+ hour days to get the product in order, aligning the engineering team and the client across two time zones, and handling everything else that came with it.

I was also dealing with a difficult high performer lead who was openly rude and a couple low performer team members who complained constantly for no good reason, and I think I let that affect the way I managed everyone else.

In the end, they banded together and complained to the COO, who decided to knowingly dump a negative feedback bomb on me two days before my wedding, when I was already very busy preparing us for launch.

I didn't take it well. I pushed back hard. What was supposed to be a 30-minute feedback meeting turned into a 2-hour rant from me, and afterward I even sent him an A4-page rant explaining my side of everything. I guess that was the final nail in my coffin.

That said, I do agree with some of the criticism. I was probably too hard on people. I'm not here to argue that I was treated unfairly. I can see my mistakes.

But I've been replaying this over and over in my head all week, despite having a conversation with the CEO during my exit interview. He told me I did 90% of things well and mainly needed to improve the way I give and receive feedback. He even laughed about me clashing with the COO and joked that we should probably "clean our chakras" together.

It hurts a lot because I cared so much and even when deciding to go i to PM i thought Im gonna be better than my past managers, but no work life balance and stress got to me. I also feel stupid because it was a very well paid gig but I let my principles to get in a way. I keep wondering whether I'm just not cut out for management or whether this is simply one of those painful lessons that many first-time managers go through.

I'd appreciate any seasoned manager or even some mature fatherly advice at this point.

I'm 29 and just got fired from my first management position at an agency after 2 months. Before this position, I ran my own tech business for a couple of years and mostly worked as an IC.

The frustrating part is that the team was delivering results. The client was also very happy. The project I inherited mid-flight was already in rough shape when I joined, and I had to push a lot of decisions get things back on track because we needed to be functional for a couple of important events that served as our deadlines.

I cared a lot. Even though it was only a 10-week gig, I was doing 12+ hour days to get the product in order, aligning the engineering team and the client across two time zones, and handling everything else that came with it.

I was also dealing with a difficult high performer lead who was openly rude and a couple low performer team members who complained constantly for no good reason, and I think I let that affect the way I managed everyone else.

In the end, they banded together and complained to the COO, who decided to knowingly dump a negative feedback bomb on me two days before my wedding, when I was already very busy preparing us for launch. I didn't take it well. I pushed back hard. What was supposed to be a 30-minute feedback meeting turned into a 2-hour rant from me, and afterward I even sent him an A4-page rant explaining my side of everything. I guess that was the final nail in my coffin.

That said, I do agree with some of the criticism. I was probably too hard on people. I'm not here to argue that I was treated unfairly. I can see my mistakes.

But I've been replaying this over and over in my head all week, despite having a conversation with the CEO during my exit interview. He told me I did 90% of things well and mainly needed to improve the way I give and receive feedback. He even laughed about me clashing with the COO and joked that we should probably "clean our chakras" together.

It hurts a lot because I cared so much and even when deciding to go i to PM i thought Im gonna be better than my past managers, but no work life balance and stress got to me. I also feel stupid because it was a very well paid gig but I let my principles to get in a way. I keep wondering whether I'm just not cut out for management or whether this is simply one of those painful lessons that many first-time managers go through.

I'd appreciate any seasoned manager or even some mature fatherly advice at this point.

Just got fired from a contract after \~10 weeks.

I was basically covering Product Owner, Project Manager, Support Lead, Business Analyst, Scrum Master, and at some points even QA roles.

Team was 6 people: 1 tech lead, 1 senior/lead dev, 2 mid devs, 1 QA, and me as PM/PO.

Project itself wasn't huge. It was a food bank platform consisting of 3 systems: storefront, point of sale, and admin console.

Timeline was roughly:

Week 1-2: Tech lead + senior dev join
Week 3: I join together with 2 mid devs
Week 5: QA joins
Week 6: We finally set a strategy how to move forward
Week 7-12: We deliver, but with lots of overtime, lots of unnecessary stress, having to constantly argue with techlead+senior dev about project direction and etc.

From week 1 until around week 6, the tech lead and senior dev were basically driving the project. The problem was that very little meaningful work was being delivered to the client, while the client was burning a lot of money on us.

So I took more initiative. Over the next \~6 weeks I got the timeline under control, pushed through some important wins, got us where we needed to be, and ultimately helped secure an extension of the contract. I even managed to get into a good working relationship with the "god complex" senior dev, who doesn't actually have too much of social skills...

Then on week 11 I got the news. The feedback was basically: I managed the project and client very well, but the team - mainly the tech lead, lead dev, and QA - wasn't happy with my soft skills. It was 2 days until my wedding, I was in a high stress situation already, COO was aware of all this, but still decided to dump this generic feedback on me. In the beginning of the meeting I tried to ask clarifying questions, show that I hear what is being said, even started sharing my screen and pointing out contradictions between feedback and between the actual situation. When I noticed that COO is not listening to me, I kinda went ballistic, reminding him how much effort I've put into managing the senior dev who is very rude, what risks I managed and etc.

And to be fair, there definitely was friction. I was constantly pushing back on the tech lead and lead dev about project strategy. They had also worked together before and came into this project as a package, while I was the outsider, most of the time it was 2v1 and I could barely win any arguments. Imagine that me as a PO/PM had to convince devs on the direction product is going, does that make any sense?

QA - was all over the place and I had to remind him multiple times what the priorities were. Eventually I called him out in the group chat in front of everyone. After that he started doing what was needed, but looking back, I can obviously see why that didn't exactly help the relationship.

What bothers me is that I feel like I was put into a situation where I had responsibility without clear authority.

Nobody communicated that the tech lead and senior dev expected to drive the project themselves. I'm 32 and these guys are roughly 36-45, with the tech lead being Director of Engineering level, so I expected that at minimum we'd establish who owns what and how decisions are made.

Instead, it felt like three people were trying to drive the same car at the same time.

They had the wheel for the first \~6 weeks, the project wasn't going anywhere, then I stepped in because somebody had to. We got the project back on track, hit the important deadlines, and got the extension.

Then I got bombarded with negative feedback and removed.

Based on the information I have, the lead dev basically gave an ultimatum behind the scenes: either he goes or I go. And from the company's perspective the choice isn't exactly difficult. If the PM has already gotten the project back on track and secured the extension, while the lead dev writes 90% of the code, you keep the lead dev.

So yeah. Lots of drama.

I feel like I participated in some kind of social experiment where the company wanted to see what happens when three people who all think they should drive the project are put together without clearly defining who actually has the wheel.

The soul-crushing part is that I pulled the project out of the ditch, got it across the finish line, and now I'm the one looking for another job.

I do have some takeaways from this.

I should've started 1:1s much earlier. I should've clarified the decision-making hierarchy, roles, and responsibilities on day one instead of assuming senior people would naturally sort that out.

And I definitely need to work on giving and receiving feedback. I can get too hot-headed, especially when I feel like criticism isn't based on the actual situation. Even when I think I'm right, how I communicate it obviously matters.

But I'm curious what experienced PMs/POs would take away from this.

How do you protect yourself from getting into projects like this?

What questions do you ask before joining a project to understand who actually has decision-making authority?

How do you make sure that if you're going to carry full responsibility for delivery, you're also given enough authority to actually do the job?

How do you manage an agency based team in a startup environment, with lots of overtime, overlap between two zones, tight deadlines, and at the same time manage not to get burned out yourself?

And finally, how do you manage team members who are silent during planning phase, constantly complain during implementation phase and then after release jumps on the "I would have done things differently" train, when based on available information at the time, the best decision was made right then.

Just got fired from a contract after ~10 weeks.

I was basically covering Product Owner, Project Manager, Support Lead, Business Analyst, Scrum Master, and at some points even QA roles.

Team was 6 people: 1 tech lead, 1 senior/lead dev, 2 mid devs, 1 QA, and me as PM/PO.

Project itself wasn't huge. It was a food bank platform consisting of 3 systems: storefront, point of sale, and admin console.

Timeline was roughly:

Week 1-2: Tech lead + senior dev join
Week 3: I join together with 2 mid devs
Week 5: QA joins
Week 6: We finally set a strategy how to move forward
Week 7-12: We deliver, but with lots of overtime, lots of unnecessary stress, having to constantly argue with techlead+senior dev about project direction and etc.

From week 1 until around week 6, the tech lead and senior dev were basically driving the project. The problem was that very little meaningful work was being delivered to the client, while the client was burning a lot of money on us.

So I took more initiative. Over the next ~6 weeks I got the timeline under control, pushed through some important wins, got us where we needed to be, and ultimately helped secure an extension of the contract. I even managed to get into a good working relationship with the "god complex" senior dev, who doesn't actually have too much of social skills...

Then on week 11 I got the news. The feedback was basically: I managed the project and client very well, but the team - mainly the tech lead, lead dev, and QA - wasn't happy with my soft skills. It was 2 days until my wedding, I was in a high stress situation already, COO was aware of all this, but still decided to dump this generic feedback on me. In the beginning of the meeting I tried to ask clarifying questions, show that I hear what is being said, even started sharing my screen and pointing out contradictions between feedback and between the actual situation. When I noticed that COO is not listening to me, I kinda went ballistic, reminding him how much effort I've put into managing the senior dev who is very rude, what risks I managed and etc.

And to be fair, there definitely was friction. I was constantly pushing back on the tech lead and lead dev about project strategy. They had also worked together before and came into this project as a package, while I was the outsider, most of the time it was 2v1 and I could barely win any arguments. Imagine that me as a PO/PM had to convince devs on the direction product is going, does that make any sense?

QA - was all over the place and I had to remind him multiple times what the priorities were. Eventually I called him out in the group chat in front of everyone. After that he started doing what was needed, but looking back, I can obviously see why that didn't exactly help the relationship.

What bothers me is that I feel like I was put into a situation where I had responsibility without clear authority.

Nobody communicated that the tech lead and senior dev expected to drive the project themselves. I'm 32 and these guys are roughly 36-45, with the tech lead being Director of Engineering level, so I expected that at minimum we'd establish who owns what and how decisions are made.

Instead, it felt like three people were trying to drive the same car at the same time.

They had the wheel for the first ~6 weeks, the project wasn't going anywhere, then I stepped in because somebody had to. We got the project back on track, hit the important deadlines, and got the extension.

Then I got bombarded with negative feedback and removed.

Based on the information I have, the lead dev basically gave an ultimatum behind the scenes: either he goes or I go. And from the company's perspective the choice isn't exactly difficult. If the PM has already gotten the project back on track and secured the extension, while the lead dev writes 90% of the code, you keep the lead dev.

So yeah. Lots of drama.

I feel like I participated in some kind of social experiment where the company wanted to see what happens when three people who all think they should drive the project are put together without clearly defining who actually has the wheel.

The soul-crushing part is that I pulled the project out of the ditch, got it across the finish line, and now I'm the one looking for another job.

I do have some takeaways from this.

I should've started 1:1s much earlier. I should've clarified the decision-making hierarchy, roles, and responsibilities on day one instead of assuming senior people would naturally sort that out.

And I definitely need to work on giving and receiving feedback. I can get too hot-headed, especially when I feel like criticism isn't based on the actual situation. Even when I think I'm right, how I communicate it obviously matters.

But I'm curious what experienced PMs/POs would take away from this.

How do you protect yourself from getting into projects like this?

What questions do you ask before joining a project to understand who actually has decision-making authority?

How do you make sure that if you're going to carry full responsibility for delivery, you're also given enough authority to actually do the job?

How do you manage an agency based team in a startup environment, with lots of overtime, overlap between two zones, tight deadlines, and at the same time manage not to get burned out yourself?

And finally, how do you manage team members who are silent during planning phase, constantly complain during implementation phase and then after release jumps on the "I would have done things differently" train, when based on available information at the time, the best decision was made right then.

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

TL;DR: New PM on a messy rescue project. My burnt out, paranoid Lead Dev fights me on nearly every single requirement, and my early "friendly" approach blurred team boundaries so badly that even QA tries to dictate product scope. I plan to use our upcoming retro to firmly reset roles (PM owns What/When, Devs own How). Is a retro the best place to lay down the law, or should I handle this differently?

Full context:

A new PO/PM here looking for a sanity check on a messy team dynamic.

I’m 6 weeks into a 14 week agency project. I inherited a crap situation, and our main goal right now is just stabilizing the system. The team is me (PM/PO), a QA, 1 Lead Dev, 1 Tech Lead (who is leaving the team soon), and 2 Mid Devs. My goal is to deliver the project and get an extension while devs goal seems to be overengineering.

The biggest issue right now is the Lead Dev. He has zero soft skills, is totally burned out, and is incredibly paranoid. He constantly challenges me on WHAT we should be building and WHEN we should be building it.

For context, I come from tech background myself and even though I'm not "god tier", I'm skilled enough to know off the bat when technical pushback is valid and when it isn't. This guy is just a paranoid control freak. For example on Friday, we spent 3 hours battling over adding two simple sort parameters to an existing query just to sort the list by most recent. I eventually had to escalate to the Tech Lead to get it done. He doesn't trust anyone and it's tanking not jusy team morale but out efficiency as well.

I'll admit I made mistakes early on. I was too friendly and probably too often came off as uncertain, which blurred the lines of who is responsible for what. The process is weird now, even our QA thinks now he gets a say in what should be built and when, instead of focusing on his own work.

Our first milestone is coming up and after we reach it I plan to use the retro meeting to hit reset. My plan is to enforce strict boundaries on responsibilities. I need to make it clear that my job is to define the What and When, and devs focus should be providing context on the How and explaining the tradeoffs, but in the end I should be making the final decision. I also plan to stop being so accommodating and start giving much firmer direction.

What are your thoughts on this? Is the retro the right place to put my foot down, or should I handle this a different way?

I love my oneplus 15 despite one thing - if I for example open an app from a folder on my home screen and later decide to navigate to home by either tapping on home button or clicking back - instead of seeing home I see the folder from which I opened the app.

Same when searching for app in the app drawer. When I want to navigate from the app back to home by tapping back or home I'm presented with the app drawer search results screen instead of home screen.

Is there any setting to fix this or do I need to install a new launcher?

I love my oneplus 15 despite one thing - if I for example open an app from a folder on my home screen and later decide to navigate to home by either tapping on home button or clicking back - instead of seeing home I see the folder from which I opened the app.

Same when searching for app in the app drawer. When I want to navigate from the app back to home by tapping back or home I'm presented with the app drawer search results screen instead of home screen.

Is there any setting to fix this or do I need to install a new launcher?

Looking for a good cheap/free tool for our nonprofit

Hey guys, we are looking or some good free tool for our nonprofit test management. We were very dissapointed with Jira Xray and were happy in the past with testrail, testiny - however they are paid and expensive.

Can you recommend some free/cheap/nonprofit friendly test case management system for us, similar to testrail/testiny, with nice big dashboard, ability to invite others for testing, see progress, scenarios and etc. ?