Welcome back! I hope you got to implement at least some of the tips from the previous article. In case you have missed it, check out or calendar- and inbox-oriented advice here: How To Manage Your Time While Working As A PM? 10 Hands-On Tips on How to Make Your Calendar and Inbox Great Again.

It’s been quite a while since talked about our failures here. Since then, we've made some new mistakes but used each of them as an opportunity to grow and we would like to share with you the lessons we learned. In Netguru, we strive to deliver the best work possible, but, we admit, we sometimes fail and, as long as we don’t make the same mistake twice, we accept it as a part of the learning curve. Today, I’d like to tell you about the popular mistakes a PM can make (and we know because we’ve made them all) so that you can avoid them in your daily work.  

Managing projects can be a bit confusing - you are juggling a lot of tasks, and it’s hard to name one main thing you are responsible for.  Let’s try and see what makes up a PMs week at Netguru - hopefully, this will let you understand the role a bit better!

The answer, of course, may vary. I hope I won’t surprise or disappoint anyone by pointing out that all I’m sharing here are my experiences and thoughts - there are no definite answers for such a question in a complex environment.

Jira is a really popular tool for tracking bugs, issues, and project management activities in general so you would think that the wide range of option it offers are just common knowledge at this point, and the adoption of productive integrations and apps has been exploited to the point where it is really hard to do something more effective anymore. The reality is a bit different, though, and there are a few reasons why most companies do not take advantage of the full potential of Jira, the main ones being:

You start working as a Project Manager. If the company is at least the size of Netguru (almost 600 people, including almost 50 PMs, and still growing), after a couple of days you will have this overpowering feeling that it’s impossible to do to your job. Honestly, this feeling will come back every once in a while. But this only *seems* unmanageable – after all, who is better at this than yourself, a ma-na-ger? In general, don’t leave things for later, you will forget about them or they will pile up and suffocate you (metaphorically speaking, of course). There is no way you can remember everything. You can try, but I am certain that your brain will fry or shut down pretty quick. Here’s a list of 10 useful tips and tricks on managing your calendar and inbox as a gift from me, a PM at Netguru.

Imagine the nightmare of every project team: all tickets in the sprint are done, but the feature itself is not working. Unfortunately, as I’ve experienced too many times before, such a scenario is not that far from the reality of project management. It all boils down to finding the right form of task description. In most cases, we balance between poorly described tasks, which results in extra clarification meetings or calls during a sprint, and exhaustive, detailed lists of requirements which tend to kill developers’ creativity.

Agile project management is still going strong in 2019, and since it’s a big part of our daily work at Netguru, we try to stay up-to-date with the best tools and techniques out there. Here’s a list we’ve compiled of the best tools for PMs, some of which we use across the company, and some, we think, do a great job in certain circumstances.

If you’re a product owner and want to work with a team from bespoke software development company that will develop your product, imagine the following situation. You’re a sport team coach and your task is to draft a team of players that will guarantee a victory in the championship. Who you need is a star that will lead your whole team and a ball handler guy who will turn your idea for the game into a game plan. You will also need a glue guy who will pass the ball smoothly and dominating centers who will score points. A dirty job guy may also come in handy to check whether you are turning your strategy into life. “OK, but what does sport have in common with software development”? you may ask. Not much. But it was a fun way to start this blogpost. ;)

After managing software development projects for some time, you may find it surprising how design projects can differ from them. In this article, you will find five important tips on how to survive and succeed. If you have any doubts about their usefulness – it is not only the Project Manager’s point of view, the tips gathered are the essence of my conversations with designers as well.