The PM, The Stand-up, And The Waterfall
For most people the Grand Game is a lifelong learning experience in Narnia. For PMs it’s standing in a wardrobe yelling in the darkness, unable to find the door.
I’ve often struggled in new roles, primarily because I’m fond of throwing myself in at the deep end when I want to learn something, have a masochistic bent on feeling like I don’t belong thanks to the usual Imposter Syndrome, and very definitely having learnt C partially from “C By Dissection” and sweating profusely over the curt source code.
It’s the best way really, chucking yourself in, as you’re often not the best judge of your abilities and it’s really quite nice to find out that you actually know more than you think, can pick up things much faster than you think you can, and, above all, begin to realise that people actually respect you for your knowledge and experience.
Wait, what am I talking about?
Few people other than fellow progressive developers actually respect you for your knowledge and experience — managers, and their ilk, are typically hostile, resent paying your (meagre) wages, and find it a constant source of irritation when you turn out to be correct and they turn out to be inevitably wrong.
That why they really don’t like asking questions, preferring to make uninformed and often counterintuitive…
