u/Still-Gold-6146

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. ?

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. ?

Nu negaliu jau kokie 2m tik ji perku. Is ciaupo neskanus.

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner of 7 years with whom we are getting married after 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?

Ar yra koks AI kuris gerus transcriptus is lietuviu kalbos meetingu padaro?

Very wired and hyperfocused on my first PM role

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner with whom we are getting married after 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?

Very wired and hyperfocused on my first PM role

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner with whom we are getting married after 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?

Very wired and hyperfocused on my first PM role

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner with whom we are getting married after 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?

Very wired and hyperfocused on my first PM role

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner of 7y with whom we are getting married in 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?

1st job as a PO/PM, previously used to work as a dev who also performed PO functions.

I am a month in. Very hyped up and Im working basically 14 hour days from 7am till 9pm for the past 4 weeks.

There is an overlap with devs during the midday and a late evening overlap with clients.

There are ups and downs, but I in general I love the challenge, gathering requirements, making decisions, pushing things to go faster, removing bottlenecks and in general helping my team out to be as efficient as possible and making sure we are on the right track, we are in sync and etc. I am nearly addicted to this job because it pays amazingly well and for the first time in a very long time I feel like I'm where I need to be - able to use my full potential and etc. And I'm learning a ton of valuable experience.

I cant turn it off. Even when I'm away from PC I'm thinking about how to push things through. I used to own my own busines few years ago where I owned a few online gaming products and it reminds me of those times. The rush the risk management and so on. But without risking my own pocket this time. Perhaps this job is pulling me out of depression, in which I was for atleast 1.5 years.

We have milestones for july, august and september where our system is gonna get live tested during sales. I have something to look forward to.

I'm trying to limit my worktime, being more efficient and find some balance again, because I'm afraid that I'm gonna burn out soon if I keep this up. Problem is, nothing else in my life atm gives me dopamine, even though I have a partner with whom we are getting married after 5 weeks, lol.

How to find some balance?

I joined this project about 2 weeks ago and I'm drowning a bit. There's a soft launch in ~4 weeks and a big one in 9 weeks. I want a gut check on whether I'm handling the team side right.

The situation:

Infra isn't ours yet. We're mid-migration to a new cloud provider and waiting on a nonprofit grant to approve the account, so we can't have any deployments. Worst part is they had 4 weeks before me joining to sort this out but didn't. Same story with our project management tooling — waiting on another nonprofit grant before I can setup a proper task board and backlog, so now I'm stuck working with an inferior platform that reduces clarity.

The backlog is a mess. ~70 tickets, maybe 40 of them unclear or unscoped. I'm still learning how the product actually works while grooming with two non-technical client stakeholders who can't really make informed calls, so I end up handing them my not that well informed decisions to rubber-stamp.

The dev team has no visible initiative. I have 3 devs. The tech lead pours all his time into infra and obscure tech-debt refactors that don't even have proper tickets — he's speedrunning toward burnout and seems to be a total control freak. The second full-time dev quietly ships fixes with almost no communication. The third dev is part-time and seems to be doing basically nothing, just a task or two for visibility while he focuses on his fulltime position somewhere else.

During my second week I told them to start posting daily updates in the chat, and this week we started daily standup meetings.

My goal is to agree on priorities, do a workshop, get some estimates, communicate the proposed actuon plan to the client, and start delivering. But when we discuss features, devs argue for ideal refactors and perfect solutions instead of what gets us to launch. I see perfectionism but no initiative, no ownership, no technical investigations or proper scoping — just devs pushing back without regard for the client's deadlines.

No estimates, no roadmap. Two weeks in, it's effectively me plus the team, and we still don't have estimates or a roadmap. Another senior tech lead was assigned to this project from day one (around 5 weeks ago) and was supposed to provide the technical evaluation and set the roadmap and action plan - but so far all he's done is set up some intro meetings and send a few emails, and frankly enabled curent lead dev's bad decisions (which is why we still have no infra and no proper tooling) around 4-5 weeks total into the project. Sure, we'll save the nonprofit client some money this way, but we're working at 40% capacity at best due to these constraints, so we've already burned through more money than we'll ever save them long-term, and continue to do so with such inefficiency.

My biggest fear is that we won't deliver in time and the project won't be extended with us after 3 months.

How do I stop engineering from over-engineering and gold-plating, while also not letting delivery drag?

How do I create urgency and accountability when I'm new, don't fully know the product yet, and don't have the usual tooling to make work visible?

How do you get a team to start scoping to "what does this milestone or a refactor actually need"? Shoud I pause all coding tasks?

How do you handle a tech lead who disappears into infra/refactors with no tickets to show for it and lets his principles cause major delays?

What's the right move with a developer who isn't producing - process fix or direct conversation?

Is it reasonable this early to draw a hard line like "if it's not a ticket, it's not in the sprint"?

I joined this project about 2 weeks ago and I'm drowning a bit. There's a soft launch in ~4 weeks and a big one in 9 weeks. I want a gut check on whether I'm handling the team side right.

The situation:

Infra isn't ours yet. We're mid-migration to a new cloud provider and waiting on a nonprofit grant to approve the account, so we can't have any deployments. Worst part is they had 4 weeks before me joining to sort this out but didn't. Same story with our project management tooling — waiting on another nonprofit grant before I can setup a proper task board and backlog, so now I'm stuck working with an inferior platform that reduces clarity.

The backlog is a mess. ~70 tickets, maybe 40 of them unclear or unscoped. I'm still learning how the product actually works while grooming with two non-technical client stakeholders who can't really make informed calls, so I end up handing them my not that well informed decisions to rubber-stamp.

The dev team has no visible initiative. I have 3 devs. The tech lead pours all his time into infra and obscure tech-debt refactors that don't even have proper tickets — he's speedrunning toward burnout and seems to be a total control freak. The second full-time dev quietly ships fixes with almost no communication. The third dev is part-time and seems to be doing basically nothing, just a task or two for visibility while he focuses on his fulltime position somewhere else.

During my second week I told them to start posting daily updates in the chat, and this week we started daily standup meetings.

My goal is to agree on priorities, do a workshop, get some estimates, communicate the proposed actuon plan to the client, and start delivering. But when we discuss features, devs argue for ideal refactors and perfect solutions instead of what gets us to launch. I see perfectionism but no initiative, no ownership, no technical investigations or proper scoping — just devs pushing back without regard for the client's deadlines.

No estimates, no roadmap. Two weeks in, it's effectively me plus the team, and we still don't have estimates or a roadmap. Another senior tech lead was assigned to this project from day one (around 5 weeks ago) and was supposed to provide the technical evaluation and set the roadmap and action plan - but so far all he's done is set up some intro meetings and send a few emails, and frankly enabled curent lead dev's bad decisions (which is why we still have no infra and no proper tooling) around 4-5 weeks total into the project. Sure, we'll save the nonprofit client some money this way, but we're working at 40% capacity at best due to these constraints, so we've already burned through more money than we'll ever save them long-term, and continue to do so with such inefficiency.

My biggest fear is that we won't deliver in time and the project won't be extended with us after 3 months.

How do I stop engineering from over-engineering and gold-plating, while also not letting delivery drag?

How do I create urgency and accountability when I'm new, don't fully know the product yet, and don't have the usual tooling to make work visible?

How do you get a team to start scoping to "what does this milestone or a refactor actually need"? Shoud I pause all coding tasks?

How do you handle a tech lead who disappears into infra/refactors with no tickets to show for it and lets his principles cause major delays?

What's the right move with a developer who isn't producing - process fix or direct conversation?

Is it reasonable this early to draw a hard line like "if it's not a ticket, it's not in the sprint"?

I joined this project about 2 weeks ago and I'm drowning a bit. There's a soft launch in ~4 weeks and a big one in 9 weeks. I want a gut check on whether I'm handling the team side right.

The situation:

Infra isn't ours yet. We're mid-migration to a new cloud provider and waiting on a nonprofit grant to approve the account, so we can't have any deployments. Worst part is they had 4 weeks before me joining to sort this out but didn't. Same story with our project management tooling — waiting on another nonprofit grant before I can setup a proper task board and backlog, so now I'm stuck working with an inferior platform that reduces clarity.

The backlog is a mess. ~70 tickets, maybe 40 of them unclear or unscoped. I'm still learning how the product actually works while grooming with two non-technical client stakeholders who can't really make informed calls, so I end up handing them my not that well informed decisions to rubber-stamp.

The dev team has no visible initiative. I have 3 devs. The tech lead pours all his time into infra and obscure tech-debt refactors that don't even have proper tickets — he's speedrunning toward burnout and seems to be a total control freak. The second full-time dev quietly ships fixes with almost no communication. The third dev is part-time and seems to be doing basically nothing, just a task or two for visibility while he focuses on his fulltime position somewhere else.

During my second week I told them to start posting daily updates in the chat, and this week we started daily standup meetings.

My goal is to agree on priorities, do a workshop, get some estimates, communicate the proposed actuon plan to the client, and start delivering. But when we discuss features, devs argue for ideal refactors and perfect solutions instead of what gets us to launch. I see perfectionism but no initiative, no ownership, no technical investigations or proper scoping — just devs pushing back without regard for the client's deadlines.

No estimates, no roadmap. Two weeks in, it's effectively me plus the team, and we still don't have estimates or a roadmap. Another senior tech lead was assigned to this project from day one (around 5 weeks ago) and was supposed to provide the technical evaluation and set the roadmap and action plan - but so far all he's done is set up some intro meetings and send a few emails, and frankly enabled curent lead dev's bad decisions (which is why we still have no infra and no proper tooling) around 4-5 weeks total into the project. Sure, we'll save the nonprofit client some money this way, but we're working at 40% capacity at best due to these constraints, so we've already burned through more money than we'll ever save them long-term, and continue to do so with such inefficiency.

My biggest fear is that we won't deliver in time and the project won't be extended with us after 3 months.

How do I stop engineering from over-engineering and gold-plating, while also not letting delivery drag?

How do I create urgency and accountability when I'm new, don't fully know the product yet, and don't have the usual tooling to make work visible?

How do you get a team to start scoping to "what does this milestone or a refactor actually need"? Shoud I pause all coding tasks?

How do you handle a tech lead who disappears into infra/refactors with no tickets to show for it and lets his principles cause major delays?

What's the right move with a developer who isn't producing - process fix or direct conversation?

Is it reasonable this early to draw a hard line like "if it's not a ticket, it's not in the sprint"?

New PM on a tight deadline with a dev team that has no urgency. How do I push delivery without making engineering overthink everything?

I joined this project about 2 weeks ago and I'm drowning a bit. There's a soft launch in ~4 weeks and a big one in 9 weeks. I want a gut check on whether I'm handling the team side right.

The situation:

Infra isn't ours yet. We're mid-migration to a new cloud provider and waiting on a nonprofit grant to approve the account, so we can't have any deployments. Worst part is they had 4 weeks before me joining to sort this out but didn't. Same story with our project management tooling — waiting on another nonprofit grant before I can setup a proper task board and backlog, so now I'm stuck working with an inferior platform that reduces clarity.

The backlog is a mess. ~70 tickets, maybe 40 of them unclear or unscoped. I'm still learning how the product actually works while grooming with two non-technical client stakeholders who can't really make informed calls, so I end up handing them my not that well informed decisions to rubber-stamp.

The dev team has no visible initiative. I have 3 devs. The tech lead pours all his time into infra and obscure tech-debt refactors that don't even have proper tickets — he's speedrunning toward burnout and seems to be a total control freak. The second full-time dev quietly ships fixes with almost no communication. The third dev is part-time and seems to be doing basically nothing, just a task or two for visibility while he focuses on his fulltime position somewhere else.

During my second week I told them to start posting daily updates in the chat, and this week we started daily standup meetings.

My goal is to agree on priorities, do a workshop, get some estimates, communicate the proposed actuon plan to the client, and start delivering. But when we discuss features, devs argue for ideal refactors and perfect solutions instead of what gets us to launch. I see perfectionism but no initiative, no ownership, no technical investigations or proper scoping — just devs pushing back without regard for the client's deadlines.

No estimates, no roadmap. Two weeks in, it's effectively me plus the team, and we still don't have estimates or a roadmap. Another senior tech lead was assigned to this project from day one (around 5 weeks ago) and was supposed to provide the technical evaluation and set the roadmap and action plan - but so far all he's done is set up some intro meetings and send a few emails, and frankly enabled curent lead dev's bad decisions (which is why we still have no infra and no proper tooling) around 4-5 weeks total into the project. Sure, we'll save the nonprofit client some money this way, but we're working at 40% capacity at best due to these constraints, so we've already burned through more money than we'll ever save them long-term, and continue to do so with such inefficiency.

My biggest fear is that we won't deliver in time and the project won't be extended with us after 3 months.

How do I stop engineering from over-engineering and gold-plating, while also not letting delivery drag?

How do I create urgency and accountability when I'm new, don't fully know the product yet, and don't have the usual tooling to make work visible?

How do you get a team to start scoping to "what does this milestone or a refactor actually need"? Shoud I pause all coding tasks?

How do you handle a tech lead who disappears into infra/refactors with no tickets to show for it and lets his principles cause major delays?

What's the right move with a developer who isn't producing - process fix or direct conversation?

Is it reasonable this early to draw a hard line like "if it's not a ticket, it's not in the sprint"?

I joined this project about 2 weeks ago and I'm drowning a bit. There's a soft launch in ~4 weeks and a big one in 9 weeks. I want a gut check on whether I'm handling the team side right.

The situation:

Infra isn't ours yet. We're mid-migration to a new cloud provider and waiting on a nonprofit grant to approve the account, so we can't have any deployments. Worst part is they had 4 weeks before me joining to sort this out but didn't. Same story with our project management tooling — waiting on another nonprofit grant before I can setup a proper task board and backlog, so now I'm stuck working with an inferior platform that reduces clarity.

The backlog is a mess. ~70 tickets, maybe 40 of them unclear or unscoped. I'm still learning how the product actually works while grooming with two non-technical client stakeholders who can't really make informed calls, so I end up handing them my not that well informed decisions to rubber-stamp.

The dev team has no visible initiative. I have 3 devs. The tech lead pours all his time into infra and obscure tech-debt refactors that don't even have proper tickets — he's speedrunning toward burnout and seems to be a total control freak. The second full-time dev quietly ships fixes with almost no communication. The third dev is part-time and seems to be doing basically nothing, just a task or two for visibility while he focuses on his fulltime position somewhere else.

During my second week I told them to start posting daily updates in the chat, and this week we started daily standup meetings.

My goal is to agree on priorities, do a workshop, get some estimates, communicate the proposed actuon plan to the client, and start delivering. But when we discuss features, devs argue for ideal refactors and perfect solutions instead of what gets us to launch. I see perfectionism but no initiative, no ownership, no technical investigations or proper scoping — just devs pushing back without regard for the client's deadlines.

No estimates, no roadmap. Two weeks in, it's effectively me plus the team, and we still don't have estimates or a roadmap. Another senior tech lead was assigned to this project from day one (around 5 weeks ago) and was supposed to provide the technical evaluation and set the roadmap and action plan - but so far all he's done is set up some intro meetings and send a few emails, and frankly enabled curent lead dev's bad decisions (which is why we still have no infra and no proper tooling) around 4-5 weeks total into the project. Sure, we'll save the nonprofit client some money this way, but we're working at 40% capacity at best due to these constraints, so we've already burned through more money than we'll ever save them long-term, and continue to do so with such inefficiency.

My biggest fear is that we won't deliver in time and the project won't be extended with us after 3 months.

How do I stop engineering from over-engineering and gold-plating, while also not letting delivery drag?

How do I create urgency and accountability when I'm new, don't fully know the product yet, and don't have the usual tooling to make work visible?

How do you get a team to start scoping to "what does this milestone or a refactor actually need"? Shoud I pause all coding tasks?

How do you handle a tech lead who disappears into infra/refactors with no tickets to show for it and lets his principles cause major delays?

What's the right move with a developer who isn't producing - process fix or direct conversation?

Is it reasonable this early to draw a hard line like "if it's not a ticket, it's not in the sprint"?

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Masciau apie Bose QZ Ultra Gen2 bet prisiskaiciau kad su software updeitais kazka prigrybave yra ir kokybe kritus.

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Taking over a project and the original team wasn't very friendly with handover, so now dealing with a bunch of docs and struggling to keep the entire history straight.

Ideally I would like to have a single source of truth but still maintain references to specific bits of the docs I'm basing my "single source of truth"

What is the best tool you have used to centralize specs/feedback from multiple sources into one place?

Just got a pixel 10 pro. Im used to enabling mobile data only when I need to, however on Pixel its very annoying because there is an exclamation mark on mobile network bars instead of the usual LTE/5G symbol on the bars. Ideally I would like to disable this exclamation mark because it serves no value to me but apparently it seems to be not possible.

My question is this - do you guys keep mobile data on all the time and just let the OS handle it, like for example when you are using Wifi and so on? Does it have a lot of impact on how often you need to charge?

Joined an agency this week as a PM with a tech background, but I'm effectively wearing PO, PM, BA, support lead and (for now) QA hats. We're salvaging a client's broken product. Small production launch mid-July, big high-traffic launch in mi-August. Team is 3 devs (lead, tech lead, contractor) plus me, with a QA joining mid-June.

What I would ideally do: spend a couple weeks learning the product, centralize docs, draw business/system diagrams, walk through every product flow, ideally together with QA, refine the backlog properly, align with the client on priorities, deadlines, product strategy and etc.

Reality: I can't cook. There are 100+ one-liner tickets in the backlog that I can't groom because the dev env is unstable and needs migrating. I can't even login to verify anything myself, and the feedback I'm working from is from multiple sources during various timelines and latest one is like 2+ months old. So I'm stuck reading docs and scraping through product intro/overview meeting notes while doing limited product-level testing. I dont wan't to estimate and prioritize work I can't actually see, because it might all change the moment I get real access and see the real state of the product.

What's making it harder: the client and the agency is cost-conscious and insecure since the client got burned from previous devs, and apparrently today I just found out that I'm expected to give daily EOD updates to the client, despite having a sync meeting with the client just yesterday and already agreeing on action points. PM tooling is just GitHub Project boards, which is painful, hopefully will transfer to something more decent soon.

What I've done so far: joined team/client meetings and aligned roughly on priorities, started onboarding through the docs, drew some process diagrams, and began limited product-based testing until env is properly ready. For now the situation is so bad that while attempting to groom an issue I encounter 3-4 different new issues. For now I delegated task prioritization and assignment to the lead dev (who joined 2 weeks ago) until I'm operational. Im planning to propose 2-3 max updates a week to the client instead of daily until trust builds, ideally one update at the end of week should be ideal I think. Once we are ready we could even invite the client for example in Jira and he would see progress on board and roadmap himself. At the moment lets be real theres nothing much to report expect for chaos until we setup everything properly and I dont want to spam client with half assed assumptions and estimations that can change once I see the actual product.

My worry: I feel like the techlead and lead devs see me as sitting on my hands. Feels almost like they expect me to basically flood backlog with whatever AI slop spits out based on docs we have and then groom it with same AI slop based on docs and meeting notes and then to sort through it. TL even started giving me suggestions on wether I could do some infra work for him which honestly given what's going on my plate right now I cant and wont take on.

I'm trying to set expectations that I need a couple weeks to ramp, and that's assuming the env even stabilizes, but it doesn't seem to be understood. For what it's worth, I'm doing the best I can with what I've got. I'm working 12 hours a day atm 8am to 8pm and only billing 8-9h of that. I strugle to even categorize my work in timesheet because the only blocks that are clear to me are meetings, everything else goes into 1 line of a timesheet with 10-20 buzzwords attempting to summarize as best as possible what I have been working on for the rest of my day.

How do I manage this? How do I balance the pressure to produce estimates and updates against the reality that I can't do meaningful PO/PM work until I have a stable environment and enough time to document the current state to actually learn the product so I could start being more useful to the team and the client?

Joined an agency this week as a PM with a tech background, but I'm effectively wearing PO, PM, BA, support lead and (for now) QA hats. We're salvaging a client's broken product. Small production launch mid-July, big high-traffic launch in mi-August. Team is 3 devs (lead, tech lead, contractor) plus me, with a QA joining mid-June.

What I would ideally do: spend a couple weeks learning the product, centralize docs, draw business/system diagrams, walk through every product flow, ideally together with QA, refine the backlog properly, align with the client on priorities, deadlines, product strategy and etc.

Reality: I can't cook. There are 100+ one-liner tickets in the backlog that I can't groom because the dev env is unstable and needs migrating. I can't even login to verify anything myself, and the feedback I'm working from is from multiple sources during various timelines and latest one is like 2+ months old. So I'm stuck reading docs and scraping through product intro/overview meeting notes while doing limited product-level testing. I dont wan't to estimate and prioritize work I can't actually see, because it might all change the moment I get real access and see the real state of the product.

What's making it harder: the client and the agency is cost-conscious and insecure since the client got burned from previous devs, and apparrently today I just found out that I'm expected to give daily EOD updates to the client, despite having a sync meeting with the client just yesterday and already agreeing on action points. PM tooling is just GitHub Project boards, which is painful, hopefully will transfer to something more decent soon.

What I've done so far: joined team/client meetings and aligned roughly on priorities, started onboarding through the docs, drew some process diagrams, and began limited product-based testing until env is properly ready. For now the situation is so bad that while attempting to groom an issue I encounter 3-4 different new issues. For now I delegated task prioritization and assignment to the lead dev (who joined 2 weeks ago) until I'm operational. Im planning to propose 2-3 max updates a week to the client instead of daily until trust builds, ideally one update at the end of week should be ideal I think. Once we are ready we could even invite the client for example in Jira and he would see progress on board and roadmap himself. At the moment lets be real theres nothing much to report expect for chaos until we setup everything properly and I dont want to spam client with half assed assumptions and estimations that can change once I see the actual product.

My worry: I feel like the techlead and lead devs see me as sitting on my hands. Feels almost like they expect me to basically flood backlog with whatever AI slop spits out based on docs we have and then groom it with same AI slop based on docs and meeting notes and then to sort through it. TL even started giving me suggestions on wether I could do some infra work for him which honestly given what's going on my plate right now I cant and wont take on.

I'm trying to set expectations that I need a couple weeks to ramp, and that's assuming the env even stabilizes, but it doesn't seem to be understood. For what it's worth, I'm doing the best I can with what I've got. I'm working 12 hours a day atm 8am to 8pm and only billing 8-9h of that. I strugle to even categorize my work in timesheet because the only blocks that are clear to me are meetings, everything else goes into 1 line of a timesheet with 10-20 buzzwords attempting to summarize as best as possible what I have been working on for the rest of my day.

How do I manage this? How do I balance the pressure to produce estimates and updates against the reality that I can't do meaningful PO/PM work until I have a stable environment and enough time to document the current state to actually learn the product so I could start being more useful to the team and the client?