I’ve started attending the course PM Soft Skills at IAMPM school. I completed a more general course about soft skills from one author, Viktor Savchenko, a couple of years ago. It was great and now I continue studying the additional books suggested there. That course was for business and personal life. The current one is for business, for PM especially.
I’m not attracted to being PM, but I like leadership and am a team lead of the support engineering team with a PO role. So this course is pretty helpful for me. Even if support is disregarded as something less or it doesn’t have all the cycles that full development of a product has.
The first lesson, by Alexander Kryuchkov, at PM Soft Skills was about working with customers. Yes, it was more for PM, but it’s easy to find analogies with the communications of the 3rd line support, and sometimes it’s the same. I can’t talk about its content due to NDA, but I got some thoughts about setting up deadlines.
In high school, I often wondered when teachers set deadlines when they were not needed at a glance. Afterward, sometimes I got similar thoughts on work. So I’m ok and tolerate when someone not sets deadlines and often doesn’t do it myself. But it’s all wrong. Deadlines are needed, and you need to pay attention to them.
Nowadays, it’s even more challenging for me. Since most of the time, I communicate with Ukrainians even if I don’t live in Ukraine. I have colleagues that live there. Therefore, It’s uncomfortable to think about deadlines and set them when Russia launches massive rocker strikes all over Ukraine almost every night and day. Infrastructure may be destroyed, buildings might be demolished, and there might be no place to work or live.
Understandably, Western companies don’t want to work with Ukrainians now. Money for most businesses is the primary goal. Even I couldn’t think clearly or plan anything when my parents were under Russian occupation in Kherson. Even now, it’s hard to concentrate when Russia makes war crimes toward civilians every day.
