 So I get 90 seconds and then there's like 30 second rebuttal, is that how it works? Alright. Point, counterpoint. Alright. Who has the punch? Do you want to? Do you want to shut the door? No. Okay. Alright, great. Okay. Hi everybody. Thanks for joining, creating a career path within the Drupal community. My name is Sally Shaughnessy. I'm the director of project management with Atten Design Group. We're a Denver based full service digital agency and we love Drupal. So, thank you. Yep. There we go. 1982 Sally. So thank you to Lynn Winter for setting up this panel. This is going to be a lot of fun, a lot of diverse perspectives here and these folks are not shy as you've probably already heard. So just to set the table a little bit, we are going to allow these folks to introduce their own career path, their history and what got them to where they are today. Like any good agile PM, I'm going to time box them and then we'll go into some Q&A. So I have a few questions. I'll kick the conversation off and then there's a microphone right here in the room. I invite anybody to come up. There are no dumb questions. This crew is ready. So with that, why don't we kick it off here? So with some introductions, we have Lynn Winter. She is a digital strategist. She's been a little bit of everything in her career content strategy, digital strategist, PM, et cetera. We have Stephanie Alhash, PM from AMAZEE. We have Darren Peterson from Lullabot and we have Joe Crespo, director of accounts at Atten Design Group. All right. So who wants to go first and give us your introduction? How did you get to where you are? Wait, don't we have like a slide deck that will determine who goes first? We can do that. Sure. Excellent. Yay. I love it. Cool. So I'm Stephanie Alhash. I work at AMAZEE Labs. I wanted to just reiterate what she said in case you'd forgotten in the last 30 seconds. So I'm a project manager. I didn't start out to be a project manager. I don't want to be a project manager. So my story will kind of tell you how I ended up here and all the things that I do that are not project management-ish. You like the thing. So once upon a time, I was young and I wore bows in my hair. So I got my start in 2007. I was not supposed to be a project manager. I took classes to be a marketing and advertising person. In my head, I was going to be Don Draper and I was going to drink whiskey all day and live the glamorous life and produce those ads that you see in the magazine and be very witty and stylish. And as you can see, that worked partially. As I started to learn more about what the advertising world was, I was like, oh, I have to learn about ad buys. This is not the thing I thought it was going to be. And apparently it's a very stressful environment. I read a book that told me all about how stressful being in the advertising agency is and how people burn out after like three years of really producing their life's best work. And I was like, I need something a little bit more sustainable to go after. So I still got my degrees because I didn't want to go back and learn something else and pay for that. But it didn't ever benefit me learning these two things. The best part about my education was the business administration part of it. So I got my introduction to spreadsheets this way, which was kind of like the beginning of the end. Let's see. So when I graduated college, I actually started out as an event planner, which was a great thing for a college kid to do is to plan professional events for a professional organization. So I started out with the Software Association of Oregon, which is now like the Technology Association of Oregon. They put me in charge of making sure that technology professionals, C-level individuals learned each other and all the latest industry things. And I got a chance to order beer kegs on the company dime. And that was also the beginning of the end. So I realized that I had a knack for party planning. And so through that, I got to meet people like Senator Ron Wyden. We did giant events like that. And so I kind of learned crowd control, chaos management and communicating with people who were different than me. I was the first foray into talking to nerds. I worked with people like Microsoft and Regis and different giant organizations like that. And I was too young to know that that was impressive at the time. So it was just a really nice way of learning my way around that environment. Sorry, I feel like I'm taking a long time. So after I was an event planner for Software Association of Oregon, I was hired at the Drupal Association to run DrupalCon. So I helped run DrupalCon from 2012 from Denver to 2015 Barcelona. And I helped produce DrupalCon. So I was the one who took all of the community efforts associated with DrupalCon and formalized them and made things like formalizing how the schedule works, how session selection works, things like that. So I was able to take my organizational aspects and put it into creating this gigantic DrupalCon process thing. So after the Drupal Association, I joined Amazeelabs. The people who I worked with at Amazeelabs that also worked with at DrupalCon, they were my volunteers and they, for whatever reason, thought that the way that I managed DrupalCon is exactly what they wanted me to do for them at the Austin office for Amazeel. May I take a breath? So one of the things about being a project manager that is different from being an event planner or being like a DrupalCon planner is that when you're planning events, everything you do is waterfall. You know that on May 16th you're going to have X and X event and you have so many weeks to get there. And so I learned all of the things about budgeting and getting there and making sure that all the right people were involved. And then when I started with Amazeelabs, I learned that all of that was exactly the opposite thing that you wanted to do for an agile company. So I learned a lot of the things do correlate. So budgets, obviously, you're going to need to have the people that you work with that you need to have clear communication about what kinds of things and expectations that the project is going to have. And it's just a really nice way to see how my events kind of flowed into this new job. Oh, the end. And then suddenly you aged. My name is Joe Crespo. Oh, I have a clicker now. I haven't looked at these slides in like eight weeks so I apologize if I go out of sequence. I'm just going to make up my life story as I go. My name is Joe Crespo. I'm director of accounts at Atten Design Group. I actually work with Sally. Yeah, Sally's like the best PM I've ever seen so it feels weird to be sitting here, but in any event. Oh, how did I? So I actually started my career as a graphic designer. I did desktop publishing. I was a gopher at like a place that did really terrible magazines and then I learned how to use Photoshop and Illustrator and Quark at the time. Has anybody used Quark ever? Oh, are they still in like 3.3? You're like nowadays? I feel like a glacial upgrade path. In any event, I figured out how to use these applications. I hung out a shingle. I made some really terrible logos from some very small businesses. Somebody said, hey, can you do a website design? And I said, yeah, why not? So then I went to a bookstore, bought a book, figured it out, lost my shirt, became eventually a website designer, then a website developer, then a project manager. Oh, and I all did this because I needed a day job. I was a musician. My big claim to fame in my professional music career was that I joined bands just before their label dropped them and I quit bands just before they got picked up. That was my... I did that for a long time. This is the coolest picture I could possibly get. This is the only currency I ever made doing it. Let's see. Oh, and yeah, so then I became this developer working from home as freelancer for forever. And then I discovered Drupal at some point, which was really spectacular. I'd been building my own CMSs, which is... Are there any developers here at all? Okay. Right on, and don't become project managers. This is... If there's one lesson to take away from this. No, and I ended up... I built some terrible CMSs, discovered Drupal in fieldable entities, and that's like... It really just blew my mind just on that alone. And then came to work at Atten as a developer, joined the team. They were really spectacular. They were like, oh, this guy's got the gift of GAB. They made me an account manager. They actually tricked me into being a project manager. They said, oh, you're going to put you on the support team. You're going to do some small things. You'll just talk to the clients. You'll get the requirements, and then you'll just do the work. And then those engagements went well. And they said, hey, why don't you take on some work counts? You can do the work, but it's going to be too much work for you. So why don't you get a couple other developers involved? And then they were like, you know what? These are going well. You should take on a few more accounts. Probably not going to have any time for development. Just being an account manager. I took on the support team, and it's been spectacular. I wanted to be a product owner at some point. I actually did become Scrum Certified, and I started swinging the incense and wearing the robes, and I have an altar to Agile at home. I'm a big advocate. It's been super fun. And I started going low-tech and getting really excited about actually doing post-its and whiteboards and stuff like that. But that's the end of my career. Here I am today. I got a lot better looking suddenly. All right, I'm going to stand over here, because happy guys can't see me, but my name is Lynn Winter. I'm a digital strategist now, and I'll explain a little bit what that is, but I work for my own company called Managed Digital. So my whole career started out when my dad sat me down in the golf course and said, you know, had one of these talks with me. And since there's only been two in my entire life, one was when I told him I wanted to be a doctor. So we know how that turned out. The other one was this, and he sat me down one month before college and said, if you want to be successful in life, you'll become a programmer. So I didn't. And I got extra degrees for fun. So I took my 18 courses and got a chemistry degree, which actually helped me make spreadsheets later on in life. So there was a lot of value in that. And then I also got a communication degree and television production minor. So I was kind of wandering about for a little bit, but I was going to show my dad that I was not going to become a programmer, for sure. And being an accountant, he was highly disappointed. So I went off to public television for a while. I spent eight years at a public television station in Minnesota, worked on small local projects and big national projects, and basically did project management with four or five different titles throughout the years. But I got the benefit of being in a highly structured role. Television has been around for a really long time. So everybody knows why to come talk to me. Everybody knew why to hide from me. And it was a highly respected role. So it was great. There was a lot of mentorship around that as well. Towards the end, we started making websites. That's one of the acclaimed ones in the picture there where I got from the way back machine. We essentially used static HTML and put them up there, and then nobody touched them ever again. So I believe that they do something different, but I'm not there anymore. In 2008, I went over and found Drupal. I joined a small company called Gorton Studios, which is no longer around. But they did all Drupal websites for nonprofits. My role was employee number five, and what they did is they sat down two different people and said, okay, what are all the things you hate about your job? Write them down, and they made a job description. And I'm not even kidding. That's literally what they did. Turns out I like the things, but it kind of made my life a little hard because nobody really respected the role, and it was all the crap they hated to do. So it was a bit challenging at first, but I kind of dug in, started to make the role myself, and said, okay, well, I'm going to find opportunities. So I made a point to learn as much as I could that was outside the project management field. I did quality assurance testing, Google Analytics stuff, wrote user manuals, did information architecture, started doing content strategy, did sales, and it was great because it was a super small environment. I could do all those things, but it allowed me to be more than what they thought as just a project manager. But I had a hard time. I would go to Drupal conferences. My first one was in Chicago in 2008. I literally found a couple of project managers, which one of them is in the room, and stocked them down. It was super awkward, but there was nobody. There was no PMs anywhere, so it was really hard. And eventually I kind of found my clan, and one of them was going to the National DPM Summit, which I think everybody up here has gone to. And it's a great place to, like, just learn things from people and just hang out with the people that do your thing. Show up at eight o'clock with everyone at their laptops in the front row because we're all dorks like that. But it was awesome. But today I'm doing something really different. I started going freelance last summer and tried to figure out... It was unplanned and untimed, so I was in the path of trying to figure out what do I want to do? Do I want to get a PM job? Something else. My last job for a couple of years is managing the digital team. And from all my connections that I've made in the Drupal community, I've been able to further on with my content strategy work. So right now I do, like, half content strategy, half project management, and what we needed was more time with our family at this point. So like these guys, I also had a varied career path into project management. I'm originally from the East Coast, I'm from Boston, and I studied broadcasting. And I was a radio news anchor and I found my way into advertising at a bachelorette party when I said radio pays nothing. What do I do next? And so I found my way there, too. So we have one more person to speak. And we'll get into some questions. Hi. So by now, you can hear some themes coming up. I think if you wanted to get the shortcut of my story, you would take everything they all said and put it in the bag and shake it. And that would be me. I work for Lullabot, I should say. We are a design and strategy and development agency that does big Drupal sites for publishers with a lot of content, problems we'd love to talk to you. So that fat child with the hair grew up and wanted to become a jazz musician. And so he played saxophone. Look at that. Look at that permed hair. Look at those contacts. That's what happens when your mother plans your senior picture. So I went to college for jazz. I started a family. I needed a job. And I fell into computers. And then I became a programmer. So over the course of the last 18 years or so, I went from programmer to dev lead to I don't get to touch code anymore at all. And I said, oh, this is not good. And so I changed jobs and I went and got trained by Lullabot before I was ever working for them in Drupal 6. So approximately 2010, I went from manager back to developer taking theoretically a step backward, as I wanted. And within a year, I was the manager again. There wasn't anything I could do because apparently I was willing to talk to clients. I was willing to use spreadsheets. And that's what it takes. So I became a project manager in effect working at an agency in Portland, Oregon, just because it was happening that way and the person who was actually quote-unquote the project manager, all that it was come up behind you, they would come every three or four days and stand over your shoulder and ask you if it was done yet. And that was the entirety of their tactics. They were not supporting the team or any of that stuff. So I learned a lot of things not to do. Meanwhile, I was account managing and managing the ticket queue and a bunch of other stuff together. So at that point, I was sick of the place I was at and I went to apply at Lullabot like I'll just throw my hat in the ring and maybe they'll hire me. They asked for code samples to further the interview. They also posted a project manager job. And so in the course of that interview, my phone died sitting in my car. There were just a whole bunch of them. They hired me anyway and the rest is history. So I became a project manager full-time. I can't see what I said. Oh, yes, sometimes you tank a project. This is the part of my life where I sucked for approximately 18 months because I went from, I'm kind of a project manager to a cop. I'm a project manager. And all the things that I didn't know were suddenly revealed to me not just because I was incompetent but because I pulled a short straw on every client gig that Lullabot got for about 18 months. So I got a nightmare client after a nightmare client and my bosses and peers were very supportive as I figured out, oh, okay, I can't say yes to everything because that's what developers do. Anybody know what I'm talking about? We can do that. We can build it. And then project managers are supposed to be like, yeah, we're going to need to hang up the phone and talk for a minute, right? So I learned not to say yes on the first request, right? Talk to the devs, get an estimate, come back and say, well, we've decided that that's not in scope because I just read my SOW. So all those kinds of do's and do nots, I sort of picked up over those 18 months and I went from, this is painful to, oh, we have a fixed bid project that looks scary. Give that to Darren, which I'm not sure I'm happy about, but that is what it is. So I began to suck less and things began to go well and all along the way is part of the other undercurrent here. I've been interested in the history and where did we get agile from? Where did we get waterfall from? All those kinds of things were, I was really curious about. I was a self-taught developer in that respect. So I studied a whole bunch on how does all this stuff work and where does it come from and why does it work the way that it does, what is agile actually trying to answer. So that all began to inform what I was doing to the point that I wasn't hurting anymore and I wasn't having sleepless nights and my team wasn't mad at me and all those things were good. So with that then I've been able to sort of transition at the Digital Project Management Summit and things like that begin to join the community of project managers and try to give back some of those lessons and things like that. And I'm even sort of in the same direction that Lynn has gone. I'm branching out into other disciplines like content strategy and trying to understand some of that better for the benefit of the projects that I'm on. And I still play the saxophone. Ta-da. Thank you very much everybody. So I'm going to ask a few questions here before we throw it out to all of you guys to start Q&A. We have a couple of panelists here who are former developers and a few that aren't. How has being a technical PM or a non-technical PM made your life either easier or harder when Drupal is the platform? Developers? Hands going up all over the room. Can we play for non-developers? Sure. So when I started with the Drupal Association there was like four or five people who worked there and so when I had to have a website and run DrupalCon and do registrations and things like that and for whatever reason that fell to me and so by my third day on the job I was like hands in the back end of the Drupal website and learning as I was going along and through the course of my time there we took it from this kind of broken cod site if you are familiar with cod, it was tears but we've since gotten into the beautiful place that it is now but throughout that entire three-year period we took this busted broken site that had been patched together by multiple companies sparing three hours at a time to come and build things and I learned Drupal that way. No one ever sat down and showed me what a content type was. I just learned to click around and because of that because I became the site administrator and the person who goes and changes things in babysits this living website I can now, if I hadn't of had any of that background I would have never been able to jump in and be able to talk to clients about what things are, how taxonomy works how content types, the amount of configuration that you can do all the different options and because of that I can actually step in for my clients and we don't just do a checklist I can just assume knowing what they are trying to accomplish like I can sit with a developer skip the step of talking with a client and getting the proper configurations out Yeah, I can start at least, I'm not going to speak for you I'm just going to speak for me and what I'm going to say is the big challenge I think would be becoming a PM Developers, can you put your hands back up in the air? Hey, all of you suck at doing estimates Yes And I took that into my project management role, I would get on the phone with a client and they would say, oh, that's 15 minutes or that's 30 minutes or that's a day and then immediately get off the phone and talk to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about and they'd say, you just committed us to three months for 15 minutes and so then I'd have to get back on the phone and tears I think that's one I think the second is one of the challenges that I had I think coming from a technical background is kind of obvious the benefit that you bring to a project so I'm going to talk about the things that are not benefits but liabilities and I think that the other liability that I brought was that we would start talking through like a client would bring an idea about what would need to be done and rather than asking why I'd immediately pivot to like how and that was I think problematic and I think it was problematic on two fronts one is that I wasn't actually going to try to address the problem that they needed to have addressed and I was trying to fix the thing that they were talking about and two is that I would get into super technical jargon land that was like not useful for anybody on the other end of the phone call and so, you know, rather than trying to think through things in plain English I would, you know, start talking about you know, fieldable entities and all that that's a second reference, I do know something else about Drupal I would just add too as a technical project manager, I knew enough to be able to know when I have to ask questions or not but I always felt like embarrassed about it for a long time for some reason like I didn't know when all the developers knew because I was surrounded by people that did that but if you're a non-technical project manager I wouldn't worry about that you just bring something different to the table so it's just not a requirement so my only contribution to all this is that there's probably a balance point between like me as a technical person who's now managing projects I need to restrain myself like Joe says from involving myself in the architecture sometimes the project needs me to know that sometimes it does not and so, letting the devs do what they do requires a force of will on the part of somebody who knows what the developer does so sometimes you gotta not do that on the other side I have to study to know how to work with designers better I need to know some of their craft but I need to know enough of their craft that I can support them and the same is probably to in the other direction that you need to know enough as Stephanie talks about of what's happening under the hood with Drupal that you could represent a developer's perspective and communicate with them but not have to make the decisions for them so there's this like sweet spot depending upon the team you have and all that kind of stuff but knowing my proclivity is to like jump into those details is a way to avoid trouble show of hands, how many folks here are certified scrum masters working in Agile do we have any PMIs? alright so question for you guys do certifications matter or is on the job training? certified here not certified no I'm certified no no not at all they don't matter people oh I've got no that's right I'm going to repeat the comment for the recording was that it matters on your resume it matters when somebody needs to sift through a stack of resumes absolutely but I guess I'm answering it from a practical like actual because the certifications two days if your project goes sideways in two days that's a horrible project normally projects go sideways in like what six months, nine months yeah the scrum certifications two days it depends what kind you get PMIs yeah that's a course okay let me just I'm just jumping to chapter five and all my answers here I actually think that the best way to learn is by doing that might just be my own bias is that I was self-taught as a developer and the same thing with the project manager I when I first met with an agile coach I said hey I've always worked in agencies how do you do estimates in an agile way and he said don't estimate and I said well that's the end of this conversation but I also have like sort of a meat and potatoes brain there was a spreadsheet king yeah my spreadsheet so I will say I've taken a couple of runs at studying the PMP materials and gotten a ton out of it so even if you don't actually get the get the certification for cost reasons or time or whatever else especially if you're coming in as an accidental project manager you came in as a designer or a dev and you are finding yourself in project management land there's a lot of other things that you need to be thinking about and doing as a PM that you probably were not you don't come too naturally because you come from another discipline so studying the PMP told me a bunch of things that I could possibly do provided a bunch of options many of them were irrelevant because the size of the projects that I was working with just were not didn't demand the kind of rigor that the PMP tells you about but it's useful to know you could do any of these things if your project needed it but the study of it is more probably important than the actual certification in my mind so let's talk about that a little bit more are there other than the certifications are there other classes are there other resources that you would recommend folks learn about Drupal learn about Agile, learn about project management for me having someone in the mentorship role so working with someone that is a senior person or has done it for a long time that's the best way to learn from them I've done a lot of stuff all the time that you've never done before because it's kind of like outside of the straight line of project management and having someone else say here's how I did it this is an example of something and having a network of people has been the best way I've reached out to since I started to know people in the Drupal community I've reached out to several different people over the years just saying hey I'm trying to do this thing now how did you guys do this thing and everyone's been really helpful and that's been the best way for me really you know I think actually I think conferences have been really helpful I think the digital project management conference the DPM summit it's like we work for the Bureau of Digital up here we're doing a lot of log rolling for them but it's a really spectacular summit I thought it was going to be two or three days of spreadsheets and Gantt charts and it really was like a discussion of empathy and connecting with users and like and a group hug too project managers tend to be solitary creatures and actually getting into a room with a bunch of PMs to talk shop is really I think very beneficial and certainly something I've gotten a lot of value out of there's a couple of books that are useful in terms of hard resources Estimation by Steve McConnell Software Estimation is sort of the bible of the ways that you can go wrong with an estimate process knowing that estimates are all lies it's still a good book to read to know how to navigate that space Scott Birkin's book Making Things Happen is a great sort of modern look at practical project management and then there's just a lot of resources online about how Scrum has done how Agile has done and I kind of think becoming a PM is like a progressive five to six year knowledge you just sponge up a bunch of stuff while you're doing things and you learn how to do it better so there's a lot of a lot of people online that have very like the priest Agile thing, lots of religious opinions about it that you gotta spit out some of those bones in order to get to what's really useful especially if you work in an agency because Agile in a pure sense is not really a great fit for us in an agency model but there's a lot of good tips, tricks, tactics that you can pull from that and meetup groups I know in Denver the PM meetup group is really active, they meet monthly rotating topics that's been a tremendous resource for a lot of folks too do you guys have any questions? throw it out to you guys and you we'll repeat it if you don't want to get over it broken leg and all it sounds like a lot of you are in positions that you didn't see yourself in so if you could go back in time and prepare for your current position if you could do that what skills would you acquire or what things would you do to get ready for now that's a good question Joe and I do talk about that we fight over resources so I think out of these guys I'm the more let's get our hands messy real quick and figure out this thing so for me I wouldn't be able to have gone back and do anything I'm sort of just figuring it out as I go as messily as I can I think the biggest thing is being more confident earlier about this thing feels wrong I learned the hard way to now I say much earlier and I say it very loudly one of the things that you learn as a project manager is if you're a little alarm bells are saying hey this might be a thing you should go and explore why that makes you feel like that and then you communicate it to your team so that you can stop the burning before it actually starts I think that knowing as much as you can about what you have to manage so being able to avoid stepping into a hole when a designer who may have sensitive feelings needs to be communicated with in a way that's appropriate like that doesn't look right people skills is the biggest part of PM you can't learn that out of a book you just have to be able to empathize some of this stuff about learning a broad range of skills is about empathizing with the struggles that each of the people on your team are going to have and then beyond that you know you fall into the rest of it I think I think two things that I think of is one taking care of your team more I think as a PM you have all these things dumped on you you're always trying to get through your stuff and that sometimes you're just coming up to your developers or folks on your team and just saying oh I need this answer I need this and that and you know just making sure you're taking care of them in whatever way whether it's like treats or bugging their time and bugging them at the right thing I think in the middle of my PM career I really had a hard time just like I need to do my job I need to solve things I gotta fix it why don't you help me and I just kept bugging people and that was kind of frustrating so I had to learn that the hard way the other thing is really taking care of yourself I think as a PM a lot of us are in the role of like I'll just burn myself all the way you know it's different developers need to stop after eight hours and I can go 12 hours because I'm ready for tomorrow because if I don't get it ready for tomorrow then they won't have work to do and then we'll be screwed the next day and then it goes on and on and on so I found myself for years now just working way too much I mean it's partly my personality but there's just this thing of like I've got to have it lined up or the ship goes off and then who has to deal with the ship being off it's me so it's kind of like weird vicious cycle and if you don't have the support around you to say you need help you need to shift your work you're kind of in trouble with that put out a contention out there and see what you guys if you agree or disagree I would say that PMs are born not made and what I mean by that is often it's some person has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and just can't help themselves and like all of you sort of emerges into this role I'm curious if you think this is something that can be taught well or if you sort of feel like most PMs come organically out of whatever else they were doing because they simply can't help themselves I have opinions about this I think that anybody can be a PM but there's definitely a personality type that makes them be not bad because anybody can have a spreadsheet anyone can go through the motions of being a project manager and one of the reasons I didn't want to be a project manager is that I associated so much badness with people who just sucked as project managers but yeah for me it's a personality type you're the kind of person who is always going to be in first outlast and constantly everything in your head while everyone else is like out drinking a beer you're like planning the next day's meeting and you're ready to be up before God getting the agenda ready and that's just what you're going to do and you just can't teach that my first onsite retreat with Lullabot we went to Waffle House everybody knows Waffle House yes we went to Waffle House and there's a bunch of developers and we're sitting around the table and somebody ordered a side of bacon and it didn't come and I was like don't you want your side of bacon that you ordered and they were like no no no it'll be fine it's not a big deal and I'm like waitress where's this person's bacon and they're like man you PM the shit out of that because I was new on the team and so there's just something about like we're just going to make sure everybody's okay and that overdeveloped sense of responsibility is a good way to put it yeah I was last night texting 10 people to make sure they knew where the karaoke bar was and how to get there and what time we were going to be there and then if I didn't get there in time I texted more people back to say I was showing up late and somebody was like what are you doing I'm like I got to get people together this is how they're going to know where to go it doesn't stop I put that together so I mean I don't want to be the okay now I'm the one stealing the microphone so I PMed this entire week I have a color coded by day google map of where we're going what we're doing and who I need to ping to make sure that everyone is aware of the parties and making sure that the parties are actually happening there you go just rob it just throw it so now that we've established that there's a sort of neurotic personality type associated with being a project manager how do you balance that out with some self-care and managing stress and setting boundaries and taking care of yourself I got out of project management because it was too damn stressful and I couldn't handle it anymore so what are your thoughts on that well I cheated I didn't want to handle it I did everything I also have a second career shooting sport so I can do it all because I want to be the super mom of the world but when I got laid off I kind of said okay enough's enough I need to figure out the balance for my family and myself and now while I'm still doing a lot because I decided to put on a conference for PMs I have a better balance I have choices I'm making decisions so I don't have the answers so if someone else here or anyone else wants to share Joe here we go I just don't sleep anymore self-care balance is like two even weights and also you hit balance early stasis when you have one heavy weight and no weight on the other end so just work all the time no vacation exactly yeah no you'd be a joy to work with with every person when you're burned out no actually I think in all seriousness defending the projects like defending the project means not just making sure that the client is happy but also making sure that leadership knows that they only have so many resources that understanding that the day ends at 5pm and everybody's got to go home leadership doesn't know how many development resources are leadership also knows how many PM resources because I think that's what we forget to tell them we just say oh we don't have enough design time or UX or development before I just say oh and I'm totally burned out there's no PM time you need to get somehow I mean I don't know I've never hired a contracted PM ever to help support where I am but every other role I have no that's right and I think I was guilty of burning out really hard I think you know a while ago I had 15 projects and we had not enough PM resources and we were we were like we were just burning the candle at both ends and it really showed in the work you know because you have to you know it's really important to make sure that the team is taken care of and that they've got you know that they've got enough running room to actually do the work that's best for them and that means you know making sure that there's you know acceptance criteria in the tickets that there are tickets that the tickets are organized that the client has been communicated with oh are you jumping in well so I did burn out when I was working at the Drupal Association I had two Drupal cons happening simultaneously around the clock which meant like different time zones and there was no support it was me I was in charge of customer service and marketing and whatever just like the list went on and on and my days would start at like five or six in the morning and they would go until I passed out and when I left they hired two people to replace me and that was partially my fault because I just kept taking things on and kept taking things on and so when I moved to AMAZE I made the conscious decision of my laptop doesn't come home that was like the biggest thing that I would always take my laptop home and into work so my laptop never came home with me and then I made sure to set that boundary kind of going in of five o'clock means day is over I'm not going to work I'm not going to let you make me work and the good thing is that I have a company that supports that like they don't want to have people burning at both ends and so part of it is like your responsibility and also part of it is making sure that you're putting yourself in a place where people care about you not dying she could drop the mic again yeah I know I know so I mean to wrap up that theme suffering is a wonderful teacher and hopefully if you hear us having suffered on this kind of a thing lost sleep worry anxiety long days all that kind of stuff that comes from a culture that your company is supporting right so I want to say to you if you're in that it's not your fault and it's okay for you to stop like you could walk away from your desk at five o'clock and say I didn't have time for that and whatever the consequences maybe it ultimately flows upward to your leadership at your company and is not on you and then you know at some point I mean when you have to change organizations or whatever else but the really the really heavy that I'm trying to lay on is just to say you think the buck stops you but it really doesn't you're there to make sure you can do the best with what you've got and take care of your developers and your designers and all that stuff the best you can and then report upward that there's something wrong and to just to echo what Stephanie said you've got a rumbling in your tummy that something's wrong just say that right away and that was probably the biggest lesson I learned in my year and a half of of hating life was I feel like something's wrong if I sit on it if I sit on it I mean it lasted longer than that but that was just the when I was a full-time PM when I felt like something was wrong and I sat on it because maybe that'll make it better it's not going to get better it will not get better so when you feel bad about something and you think that something is wrong even if you can't put your finger on it talk about it long enough and loud enough that it becomes clear and then let everybody know who needs to know this burnout question is going on and on you actually brought up a really good point so there contract PM so can you be can you talk about freelancing in this community I mean how successful can a PM be as a freelancer? yeah so when I left my job I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do because I had done so many different things so I actually had several phone calls with people that were doing contract PM work and how they went about and got the work and started it's definitely viable a lot of people are doing it out there and one of the best models that you have two or three different agencies because every time I work with right now I have two agencies I'm working with but every time you're working with a different agency they have a different process so I am putting myself into that process and figuring out how to get in and out or how to manage a new process and so it's a lot of contact switching as well as right now I'm on Slack for one company I'm on Hitchat for another company I'm Toggle for my time over here I'm in Jira for my time over here taking tickets into Jira and so it's a lot of contact switching so there's definitely you know when you figure out what you're going to charge and stuff you need to figure out how all the dead time you are from switching around the other thing that's really tricky is when you do the PM work so my content strategy works a lot different because it's very project based and I can do hours at a time but for my one client I'm doing PM with right now I get Slack all day every day and it's okay but that's how PM work goes it doesn't say oh on Tuesday at 3 o'clock we're now going to PM it starts right now and so I've had to figure out if I'm okay with that and then I'm actually going to talk to them about pricing these days because I'm you losing all this time being bugged but I'm not I can't bill it to a project there's not really a concrete thing so I do actually think that more people could be contract PM I think it's out there if you're really solid and good but definitely building up the relationships before you kind of jump out there making sure you have a good network is kind of the way to go whether it's like you build up a local network or you platform network or whatever it is works I'm like it's no I mean it's no big deal I'm here everybody's so nice but I just I just wanted to ask the developers if or the people that were developers in a prior life because anyone can be a developer if you when you moved to be a PM if if you if you missed it if you miss the code part of it if if you have any regret and then in the same kind of breath like what you gained moving into the different role as a PM yes you miss it when you don't get to do the thing you love to do right whether you're a designer or dev you everybody reports I missed getting my hands dirty and the stuff that's one of the reasons why you have to restrain yourself because you think oh I'm a PM now I'm going to do what I used to do no you don't get to do that anymore I intentionally don't set up a local on my environment on my machine even though I could because lots of projects it's better if I can't and that way I just don't even have a choice about getting involved in some of the code level things but every once in a while it's I still need to because the team's too small and I have to provide some kind of oversight or whatever and at that level I get to enjoy that every once in a while and that part of my brain gets those endorphins and that's exciting the benefit on the other side I think is the piece of me that's not just a nuts and bolts detail developer guy who actually likes the bigger picture and likes to understand the business problems and all the other things that go into being a PM that has to gather requirements and all that gets lots of satisfaction from seeing the whole thing happen and way I'm wired I think that's better in the end so now oh yeah I miss it absolutely and whenever I have an opportunity like if if at needs like an internal project I will I will take that on myself because I'm super I just I really love doing that but I also feel like I've channeled some of that into like crazy complicated spreadsheets you know so I I had a developer said if I ever have a trial by spreadsheet I choose Joe Crespo as my champion I'm the mountain of spreadsheets so I'm not really sure how to word this but you mentioned about how you get pinged and how to bill for PM and that way and how to bring it up do you have any tips on that like how to resolve the issue right now well sometimes like like some clients like don't like from the PM perspective like they I'm having trouble but they don't always like the rate for PM or the work that goes into PM they don't really understand that side of it that a lot of PM work goes into that so how do you how do you bring that up and say actually we need to bill more for PM yeah I actually talked to someone today where an agency that actually doesn't even bill for PM time yet so the PM works on a whole project and none of the time goes to a project would kind of flirt me which is I have like because I've been a PM for so long it frustrates me to see the lack of respect for the role and the value and just because when I say what did I do all day and I wrote emails doesn't mean that we're super valuable as far as in the freelance space I just basically a couple things and not sure you're asking but one thing is I tell my clients I have other clients so yeah they can ping me and I might not get back them tomorrow and then for clients that need to know exactly when I'm working I kind of block out my calendar a little bit for them so they know when they can get a hold of me but I do try to be available because I know they have questions or things to do but you know just with anyone that's a full-time PM you don't need to respond to a client within one hour you can respond to them the next day it's completely fine unless their site is burning on fire but as far as you know just making sure that someone respects the values of the PM time I mean if somebody doesn't in general that's really hard but my plan is to just kind of give them a sense of what I'm doing and how that's impacting my time and negotiate what I think makes the most sense for that with my freelance stuff I always I figure out something that works for them so I do most of my stuff hourly just because God knows what it's going to take I'm not going to be able to estimate that how much time you want to mine but I let people know every week what I'm doing so I'm doing these things either I enter my time directly into their system or I send them an email and just say here's what I'm working on here's how much time I spent and if I have a new idea like I want to do all you know budget reports for all their clients every week here's what I think it will take should I do that and then kind of let them make choices because if they don't want me to do certain things but if I work with someone that doesn't really value the things I think need to happen to make a project successful then I just kind of part ways with that does that maybe answer in a past life when I was developer I had somebody my boss said to me you know if you go to sleep and dream about a project wake up and update your time sheet but I mean you know with the point being that like you know every minute you spend on a project is a value is valuable time you spent on this project well not every minute but I mean most of the time you spend on a project is valuable you're adding value you're planning it out and as in a PM role you know those slack messages are you know those are like little micro adjustments on the project that is averting disaster and also at an agency my last role I was the production director so I have PMs and designing UX and developers under me and I got to make a lot of choices and I wanted to show the PM line I hear so many agencies hide it under some sort of overhead it's like because the role is invaluable we're not doing anything people are afraid and the first thing people need to do is just put it out there this is a valuable asset you guys are going to make or break by working with this person they're going to guide you to the finish line so we should make sure that our agencies are proud to show that and charge that time makes me angry yeah so when I started with amazing labs I didn't know I've never done agency life before and so like just learning how we do like pricing and stuff was brand new to me and apparently what we do is weird so everything that we do is one flat rate and PMs junior devs regular devs designers whatever and apparently people do like tiered or like PM gets a different percentage or whatever everything we do is one flat rate that's what we tell the clients done and then one thing that we do with the with estimations when we start our initial estimation is we include since we are very like add it all forward or whatever instead of having a PM line we have a scrum line and all of the billing that we do towards PM is actually like built into the scrum elements line item of the project and if you're looking at just the line items of things that we're going to be delivering you're like regular number, regular number, regular number and then you get to scrum and it's like triple everything else like if you're looking at it and you're just like where's the big number that's the hugest number like we're very loud about we're going to spend tons and tons and tons of time here because this is super important to making sure that all the other things are what you want them to be last question awesome lightning round okay so and this might be a loaded one but several of you mentioned that your agile evangelist it's changed your life I think somebody even said so I'm interested in what does agile mean to you and I guess to give you some context on why I'm asking or how I'm interested in that so I'm in higher ed in the public sector and in higher ed in the public sector we do love our certifications and we love our methodologies and our processes and sometimes I think there's a tendency to get wrapped up in those things and kind of miss the point behind agile get wrapped up in the scrum and get the prayer beads or whatever you said it was the ropes and all that so I'm curious what what it means to you what tools and techniques you find most valuable and to what extent you follow some of those things that's not a short answer but I'm going to go quick and then go that I believe in the big agile big A agile principles but most of my work is more appropriately agile style there's just I've worked with nonprofits most of my career and there's just not too many situations where that would be appropriate there are the right times but I'm more of a believer of there should be some sort of cab some limit we should get somewhere at some point and not continue to iterate mostly because they don't have budgets I think from a definitions standpoint I believe agile is a set of practices that can be applied to a set of problems and historically speaking this is where I nerd out push up the glasses all that stuff agile was a response to a certain way of doing things and it needs to be understood in that context so like if it was bad in 1995 when they came up with the agile manifesto and all the different things scrum and XP and all that it helps to understand how agile could be applied if you know what it was in response to so there's a history lesson to research and deal with there but basically not everything in like the religious order of agile is actually applicable to every context so you have to pick and choose the tactics great thank you and then we're supposed to say so I think most of us will be at the Lullabot Pantheon party Lullabot Pantheon party as you are we'd love to meet folks come talk to us and we can geek out on PM stuff but I also need to mention we'd love to get some feedback on the session if it made any sense if it worked for you guys and then there's sprints on Friday so do sprints but thank you guys and if you have more questions let us know thanks for coming I was nervous when you said let's jump into questions because it was over 420 and I timed it out to jump into 30 it's totally okay because I thought you guys were going to take your full 5 minutes and I think all of you started at like 33 so when you said jump to Q&A I was like oh god we're going to be over so early but it actually worked out really great so early but it actually worked out really great so there so so I tested it the other day and it worked so we'll just see if it works on this room so well that's why I tested it the other day and I was like let's just see and it showed up there