One Field Job Application: Epilogue
A few people have been asking me about how my One Field Job Application experiment turned out (preliminary results here). We ended up hiring two excellent technical web PMs. Gerry Tamakloe works out of our Dublin Office. Gerry is a powerhouse: helping teams get the most out of our systems. He is not afraid to get into the details of an application and optimize it for an internal or external customer. Katie Methe works with me here in Massachusetts. In addition to managing projects, Katie handles deployments, QA, troubleshooting of our websites and GMO applications. I bombarded her with new stuff on her first day and she didn't even flinch.
In addition to finding some great people, this little experiment has reassured me that I am not unreasonable in expecting a web project manager to be capable of both managing people and doing technical tasks. A web project manager should rise to, rather than shrink away from, a technical challenge. Rather than just distributing work, A good web pm adds value to everything he/she touches: whether it be verifying and diagnosing a defect, deploying a fix, doing technical research, or configuring software.