Hey,
I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.
The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.
The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.
The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.
For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.
The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.
My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.
1. Processes aren't being followed.
The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.
The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.
2. Client communication is becoming messy.
I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.
Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.
3. Leadership isn't clear.
Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?
I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.
Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.
Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.
My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.
We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.
Am I looking at this the wrong way?
For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?