I am planning to organize two events: 1. In-person meeting just for fun and to help facilitate people meeting together - That might be right at the end of July. 2. Workshop on deploying AI Agents for managers. A few of you were interested in my setup and I would like to share it with you. Summer is a hard time to run this community, as when the weather is nice, and it is vacation time, few of us think about improving out manageril skills and grow as leaders. But I think that is what separate us from others, we grow continuesly.

Came in this morning to an outage that started over the weekend. Most of it could have been avoided if people had read the memo that was sent out. This is not the first time this has happened and I doubt it will be the last. So I'm genuinely asking - how do you get people to actually read and act on important communications before something goes wrong?

We're moving to a dedicated on-call rotation for support. Two engineers are implementing the new process and it's going well. Before this, I had a dev team that also handled support and I used my own judgment to assign work based on who was best suited for what. Now the rotation decides. I'm fine with delegating. I think it's the right move. But I'm still accountable for release management and product delivery -> the work is no longer mine but the responsibility still is. How do you handle it when you've let go of the work but you're still on the hook for the outcome?

I had my first 1:1 with my new manager today, it was only 30 minutes, a pretty simple meeting, but an important one. I asked him for his vision for Technical Program Managers at our company. Got an answer, and while it wasn't super clear yet, it gave me enough to see where things might go. What I noticed, though, is that a vision at the strategic level needs some anchor in day-to-day actions, otherwise it stays just words, and it is hard to put into action. Still early days and only a first meeting, so that's ok. I also left him with one request: frequent feedback. He's an executive, and feedback from that level gives me a direct line to what the company actually needs and expects; that's not a small thing. What do you ask in a first 1:1 with someone new above you?

As part of the next workshop - budgetting part 2 - I would like to talk about revenue recognition and SRED, two processes that no PM course teaches and yet most professional services agencies will require you to know the basics. How many of you ever dealt with those two topics?