Be careful!

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A wise man once said: Be careful who you let on your ship, because some people will sink the whole ship just because they can't be captain.

Anonymous

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Blurring the role: Product Managers and Engineers

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From Daniel Miessler's newsletter (somewhat paraphrased)

The line between the product manager and the engineer is blurring as more PM (product manager) tasks subsume what used to be an engineer's task because of the availability of an AI engine which the PM can prompt.

Miessler opines:

"This shouldn’t be surprising since the primitives here are 1) knowing what you want to build, 2) knowing why you want to build that vs. something else, and 3) pursuing that. "

The source for this insight is here LINK

Related: 

Other reports and articles report the decline generally in the industry for "coders". This job is being taken over by AI Agents. At the Davos Economic forum in January 2025, the Salesforce.com CEO said he wasn't hiring any software engineers on a net basis. New jobs would large go to digital agents.

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Can you say: "I'm accountable"?

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Are you accountable?

Most of us want to answer 'yes, of course!'; how could it be otherwise? 

Most of us would endorse these ideas:

I'm always accountable for what I do. 

I'm accountable for that which I am responsible.

(Subtext: this can only be true if my personal integrity does not allow me to push blame on to others for failures and missteps, or claim false credit for what others actually did)

Accountability attaches credit and blame.

In popular culture, it seems to be more about attaching blame: A common refrain: "Who's to be held accountable for this!?"

Actually, being accountable means accepting blame or consequences when valid, but also stepping up and accepting accolades when earned.

I like this from Henry Evans, the author of Winning with Accountability, who says accountability is “clear commitments that in the eyes of others have been kept.”

Evans has set the frame: the final judgment about accountability is with others. 

In this sense, the concept of personal accountability is somewhat of an "earned value" idea: 

• You have a 'planned' set of responsibilities to get things done.
• You 'earn' accolades or consequences as you account for your actions
• Others judge the earnings and apply the credit or debit

Thus, in all schemes of accountability, you have a part to play: It's on you to commit to your responsibilities. So, even though Evans' statement is not explicit about being responsible, the holistic idea of accountability stemming from commitment embraces responsibility.

But what I don't like about Evans' statement is that it could be interpreted as requiring 'achievement' (in the sense of a commitment kept) when, of course successful achievement is not a requirement for accountability. Only a commitment to execute responsibly is.

And so in the context I've laid out it's common to encounter these questions:

• What is accountability, or what is it to be accountable?
• Can there be accountability without responsibility?
• Can there be responsibility without accountability?
• Are you given accountability, or do you grab it and take it on?
• Is the apex of the pyramid always accountable for anything down in the pyramid? (See: Captain of the ship is accountable ..... )

I don't want to dig too much more deeply into the psychology of 'accountability', and realistically that would be a fools' errand because project and business culture drive a lot of the answers to the questions above.

So, without making a big thing out of the answers, I'll offer my thinking here:

• As Evans puts it, accountability is about taking personal responsibility for outcomes: "I got this!" "I'm the one you can count on to get it done" "I will be there to see it through". All statements of commitment.
  And with Tom Petty in mind: "I won't back down!".
  
  
• The accountability/responsibility questions are ageless; they've been around since forever! The usual answer is: 'If you want me to be accountable for outcomes, then give me the responsibility for plans and resources. If you crater my plan and matrix out my resources, then you're accountable and not me!
  
  
• If you're not the apex (most senior executive) of the pyramid, you might be 'assigned' accountability: 'This is your mission and no one else's;  go get it done, and tell me when you're finished'.
  
  Actually, if you're low to mid in the pyramid, there's probably a backup to you. If it's a big pyramid, you may be an interchangeable cog in the mechanism. Nonetheless, grab it and go!
  
  
• Most of time, 'seniors' are always happy to have accountability 'grabbers' in the mix. It makes it easier to allocate the mission requirements. And, you may quickly earn and retain the leadership label.
  
  But the 'grabbers' are sometimes seen as more interested in climbing the ladder than actually advancing the mission. So, some balance of eagerness and opportunity is required.
  
  
• Traditionally, the 'apex' is accountable for the performance of everything done in the name of the pyramid. This is accountability without personal responsibility for outcomes. The "commitment" embedded in the concept of accountability is interpreted as 'committed to ensuring a responsible person is found, assigned, and expectations for outcomes established".
  
  In the military particularly, and certainly on ships at sea, this idea is deep culture.
  
  But, that idea often gets lost. One chief executive famously said that success has many fathers, but a failure is an orphan.
  
  Worse is the chief executive who denies accountability for all but successes. That is morally corrupt and a morale killer.

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"Cost" how say you?

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How many ways are there to say "Cost"?

Certainly, more than one!

When "they" ask: 'How do YOU manage cost?", your answer is: 'It's complicated' because there are so many varieties of 'cost'.

Project managers certainly have at least this list:

• Estimated cost (of course, an estimate has to be made in the context of a plan: scope and schedule and resource plans)
• Baseline cost (estimated cost at the beginning of a planned period)
• Re-baseline (Sunk cost, plus a "new" estimate for the ensuing period)
• Cost variance (the difference or departure of actual cost from the baseline)
  
  
• Planned value (baseline cost input to the project, over time, allocated to planned functional or feature achievement)
• Earned value (as a proportion of Planned Value actually completed)
• Cost performance Index (as a 'cost efficiency' measure of how well cost input earns value)
  
  
• Actual cost (measured at a point in time, regardless of achievement)
• Sunk cost (aka actual cost incurred)
• Direct cost (costs attributed to this project, and this project only)
• Indirect or overhead cost (common costs shared across many projects, proportionally)
  
  
• Labor cost (a component of direct cost; does not include overhead labor)
• Standard cost (used by service organizations and Time & Materials proposals to 'fix' or standardize the "labor cost by category" to a single dollar figure within a range of costs for that labor category. *)
• Material and contracted services cost
  
  
• Throughput cost (only that part of direct cost required to actually construct value outcomes; often used in combination with Standard Cost)
• Construction cost (aka Throughput cost, but sometimes also total of direct costs)
  
  
• Incentive cost (paid as direct payments to individuals and contractors for specific performance achievements)

Finance, accounting, and business management have a few more:

• General and Administrative cost (G&A), mostly for "top-level headquarters" expenses
• Marginal cost (cost of one more item that does not require more of 'something else' to enable)
• Cost margin (difference between cost of sales and revenue associated with those costs)
  
  
• Discounted cost (cost after a reserve for risk, usually calculated over time)
• Depreciated cost (cost accumulated over time, as different from cost in the moment)
• Cost of sales (direct cost to generate sales)
  
  
• Activity Based Costing [ABC] Overhead costs allocated to specific activity, plus direct costs of the activity.

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(*) Standard Cost: As an example, for Labor Category 1, the salaries may range from $1 to $10, but the Standard Cost for this category may be $7 because most in this category have salaries toward the upper end. Standard Cost is not necessarily an arithmetic average within the category; it is a weighted average

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Maximizing Utility

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Is your instinct to be a 'utility maximalist'?

If so, you are someone who wants to ring every dollar of functional effectiveness out of every dollar spent.

And why not?

Is the alternative just a waste of money?

About Utility

Utility, for this discussion, is the value placed on a functionality or feature or outcome compared to its actual cost input. 

Ideally, you would want more utility value than cost input, or at worst, 1:1. But sometimes, it goes wrong, and you get way less out than you put in. (*)

Show me the money

Here's the rub: Utility value is not always monetized, and not always monetized in conventional ways, though the cost input certainly is. So because utility usually has subjective components ... in the  eye of the beholder, as it were .... utility value often comes down to what someone is willing to pay.

As a PM, you can certainly budget for cost input

But you may have to take in a lot from marketing, sales, architects, and stylists about how to spread that cost to maximize utility and thereby maximize the business value of each input dollar spent. 

Kano is instructive

If you are a utility maximalist, you may find yourself pushing back on spending project dollars on "frills" and "style".

 

If so, there is something to be learned by by grabing a "Kano Chart" and looking at the curves. They are utility curves. They range from a utility of "1" (cost input and value output are equal) to something approaching an exponential of value over cost. 

The point is: investing in the "ah-hah!" by investing in the utility of a feature or a function will pay business benefits.

Art, beauty, and other stuff

Utility brings in art, beauty, and non-functionality in architecture, appearance, and appeal. Some call it "value in the large sense", or perhaps "quality in the large sense".

But utility also brings in personality, tolerance, and other human factors considerations

Utility maximalist leadership

It's not all about style, feature, and function.

Some leadership styles are "utility maximalist"

• Short meetings
• No PowerPoint
• Bullets (like these!) over prose
• Short paragraphs; one page
• Impersonal communications (social media, email, text)
• No 'water cooler' chat

Wow! Where's the 'art' in that list? Not much collegiality there. How do innovation and radical ideas break through?

How effective can that culture be across and down the organization (yes, some organizations have hierarchy)

On the other hand ....

• Tough decisions with significant personnel and business impacts may be more effectively made with high utility
• High utility does not rule out an effective leader soliciting and accepting alternatives. 
• High utility does not mean bubble isolation; that's more about insecurity. 

But high utility in management does mean that you give (or receive) broad directives, strategic goals, resources commensurate with value, and authority. The rest is all tactics. Get on with it! 

 

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(*) The classic illustration of utility is the comparison of the poor person and the wealthy person. Both have $10 in their pocket. The utility of $10 is much greater for the poorer person. In other words, the value of $10 is not a constant. Its value is situational. There are mostly no linear equations in a system of utility value.

And for the 'earned value' enthusiast, utility is not a measure of EV. In the EV system, all $ values have a utility of 1; value is a constant. And all equations are linear. 

For instance, the cost performance index, CPI, is a monetized ratio of the intended (planned) cost input and the actual cost realized, where "value" is held constant. 

EV is that part of the value to be obtained by the intended cost that can be considered completed or achieved at the point of examination.

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Will you be hiring a "AI Digital Agent"?

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Digital agents are here big time. At the 2025 Davos Economic Forum, the big guys from the industry opined on digital agents. Paraphrasing a bit, here's some of what was said:

• SalesForce.com won't be hiring (net headcount) human coders in 2025. SalesForce is rapidly expanding digital agents in their workforce. They way they talk about them it's almost like they are a digital human. The usual and familiar factors are in play: accurate outcomes from assigned tasks; 24/7 work "shifts"; no fatigue; no family/work balance issues, and so forth.
  
  
• WorkDay.com comes at it a bit differently. They are one of the industry leaders providing humans for all manner of business tasks and projects. They say that they are working now with providing digital agents, though it's a very small part of their business. But, in 10 years time, they predict a much different business where providing digital agents, as though they were humans, fully "trained" and ready for "integration" into the client workforce and workflow will be a big part of their business.  

So how does this work, exactly? 

How is this for a narrative?

You, as project manager, write a "job description" for the digital agent, specifying perhaps an API for your work product. The agent presumably knows how to use your tools so that the agent work product is compatible with the human work product. 

The agent presumably has some kind of "settings" that are configurable such that it (*) can internalize milestones and scope, and understand points of integration with other objects. Presumably the agent can work in multiple environments, such as development, integration and test, beta, and final release.

And what if humans fall behind, or less likely: speed ahead? Can the digital agent adjust? And what if the human product has bugs (never happens!)? Can the agent work around them, or does the agent just go in and fix the bugs as a matter or routine scope?

And are there heterogeneous agent environments, where the agents come from different suppliers? Or is it required that all agents on on project be homogeneous: that is all, of one "brand" or "architecture"?

And finally, how does the agent acquire the culture of the human organization such that its product reflects accurately the business, particularly customer facing apps, like the fast-food drive-in order-taker agent?

Over time, all this will sort itself out, but for now, we are on the cusp of a radical change in the workforce typically thought of as the white collar force. 

The business case

And finally there's the business plan or business case: Hiring and training a new graduate is expensive; hiring someone with experience is even more expensive. 

• What does a comparable agent cost? 
• Over 5 years, what's the cost of the human vs the agent? 
• Over 5 years, what's the value of the outcome from each? 
• Is there an RoI argument that is pan-enterprise and larger than the project expense statement?
• I imagine there are lots of finance and business managers going over this as we write.

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(*) Is "it" the pronoun for agents? I can foresee "she" and "he", like ships are "she", etc.

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Layoff in the middle of a project?

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Well, talk about cratering a schedule and resource plan!

Layoffs in the middle of a project will do it for you.

But wait!

There may be a silver lining here:

• Communication complexity in and among project participants decreases as the square of participants. That could be a winner
  
  
• You may be able to select the departees. That's tough in any circumstance, but it's also an opportunity to prune the lesser performers.
  
  
• Some say that if you want to speed up a project, especially software, reduce the number of people involved (the corollary is more often cited: adding people to a team may actually slow it down)
  
  
• There's an opportunity to rebaseline: All the variances-to-date are collected and stored with the expiring baseline. A new plan according to the new resource availability becomes a new baseline. Unfavorable circumstances can perhaps be sidestepped.

Of course, there are downsides:

• If your customer is external, they may not relent on any requirements. You're stuck trying to make five pounds fit in a three pound bag.
  
  
• There may be penalties written in your project contract if you miss a milestone, or overrun a budget. That just adds to the fiscal pain that probably was the triggering factor for layoffs.

Did you see this layoff thing coming?

• On the project balance sheet, you are the risk manager at the end of the day. So, suck it up!
  
  
• And there's the anti-fragile thing: build in redundancy, schedule and budget buffers, and outright alternatives from the git-go. And, if you didn't do those things in the first baseline, you've got a second bite at the apple with the recovery baseline.

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