This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #36 – The role of lead programmers vs. project managers. Here’s the situation we’re working on:

I’m a group manager in a mid-sized software company (150 people). One of the raging debates we have is over the roles of the leaders of the programming team, the group manager, and the marketing team. When it comes to any leadership or high level decision making we have very different ideas for what roles people should play. It has come up a few times that we should have one dedicated PM for each major product that can lead/co-ordinate/drive, but we’ve never settled on exactly what responsibilities that role would have.

Programmers, testers, marketers are all scared they’ll lose power or be annoyed by a dedicated PM. Right now our lead programmers balance doing much of what I’d expect PMs to do (decision making, tracking), with our small
marketing team doing the rest (requirements/market research), group managers such as myself do the high level stuff.. So I have 4 questions:

1. What are the tradeoffs of creating a new role for project management? Won’t this reduce our lead programmer’s leadership role?
2. What’s the best way to introduce the first PM into an organization?
3. How do you settle debates over who owns which decisions? (requirements, feature cuts, etc.)
4. How would you evaluate the performance of a PM, compared to other roles, if there are only a handful per project?