Ask HN: Possible to Become a Part-Time Manager? (Project or Product)

We have 4 "part time" product managers. Essentially, each one splits their time, roughly 50/50 between their discipline (marketing, fashion styling, warehouse optimisation, development) and being the product manager for the software we write for those areas in our company. They are not just stakeholders, they are PMs (in title and training). This has worked very well for us.

I actually think having a fully part time PM could be a very good thing for lots of very small startups (< 10 employees). I think many companies at that size don't fully realise the benefits of having a member of the team with those sorts of responsibilities, and in fact, might not have enough other people to saturate a PM's time.

The main downside I can foresee is that, as a developer, I often need to contact my PMs in order to clarify requirements or discuss issues that come up during implementation. This communication would be limited by a PM working part time, but a tendency to "over-communicate" as many do in fully remote companies could help to overcome this.

Thanks for your reply! I mostly agree. Saturating peoples time in a small team is usually quite easy though :).

How do you manage oversight over the different PMs at your company? Someone has to split development resources among the stakeholders and their requirements, no?

The PMs meet weekly to figure out resource allocation. Developers and designers mostly work in "pods" assigned to an area of the business (or a metric) for a few months so that they aren't shifting a lot, and so most of the resource allocation happens at that level rather than at the weekly level. We've only recently got to the size where that made sense though, while smaller we definitely needed to be able to shift dev time around more with more granularity.

My experience is mostly tied to programmers, but this isn't necessarily that different.

1. I have heard rumors that in Germany you can pretty much force your existing employer to to give you part time job: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7oye95/how_to_...

2. Best place to negotiate different working conditions is your current job. They know you and you have credibility, and you're more valuable and harder to replace since you have lots of job-specific knowledge. So I'd start with just trying to negotiate at your current job.

3. Once you have 32 hours/week, negotiating your next job is easier, since you can say "and look I did just fine." Trick is to apply without mentioning your extra conditions, get offer, and then say "I only want 32 hours /week."

Programmer-specific resources which probably are still helpful:

* Interview with someone who hasn't worked full time in 15 years: https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer...

* My book, The Programmer's Guide to a Sane Workweek: https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/

Just got a reader write in to say he'd negotiated a 32 hour workweek at a new job; it's definitely possible!

> Trick is to apply without mentioning your extra conditions, get offer, and then say "I only want 32 hours /week."

This will often result in a big waste of time for both sides. You might not care about the company waste (fair enough), but as someone who values their own time, you might prefer to find out up-front in 15 minutes that your requirements cannot be met rather than after spending a day or more on it.

Same with salary. I don’t go 15 minutes into a call with a headhunter without understanding whether we’re in the same zip code on comp. I’d rather not waste my time.

Definitely want to do some research up front to rule out places where it will never fly. But- negotiating shorter workweek is different than negotiating salary (in most countries, anyway).

My experience, as well as others I've heard from, is that if you say upfront "I want fewer hours" companies will just say "no". This is not as much an issue with salary, because there's diversity of salaries, but pretty much no companies will hire you for 4 days without extra negotiation. So: if you ask for 4 day workweek upfront the vast majority of companies will just walk away.

On the other hand, if you keep your mouth shut, once you have an offer already you're in a different situation. Worked for me, as well as person I interviewed who has done this way more than I have. The company has decided they like you, you've impressed them, now they're in "what do we do to hire this person" mode. So if you ask at that point they're much more likely to say "yes".

my neighbor from Germany was doing just this with part-time project management work. However over the last few months they have steadily increased his hours. So now he is up to full time.

regarding 1.: This is a real surprise to me and I'd of course have to carefully communicate such step before taking it, but that's indeed very interesting!

regarding 2.: Sadly I don't see the option to find a new offer and than ask for less hours or leave, this company is sloooow acting on such things...

regarding 3.: luckily I have some remote and part time experience in my vita already :)

I'll definitely consider buying your book! Even though it seems quite programmer-focused. Thank you for your advice!

Short answer: Yes, it is possible.

Source: It's exactly what I do (0.6 FTE job + part-time MSc).

From personal experience, I would say it's harder to find something part-time up front. Telling your current employer that you want to reduce your hours, for the reasons you describe, is what worked for me. You need to be in a position where they are happy with your work, and you need to clear any doubts about this change having any negative effect on your team.

From my perspective, being part-time greatly discourages me from micro-managing: I just don't have the free time that might lead me down that negative path.

Finally, my employer gets way more than 0.6 FTE of work from me (and I don't do extra hours). IMO they get more "bang for their buck": I concentrate on what's important, and work through things more efficiently.

Thanks, good to hear :)

I have no fear over micromanaging... my plate is usually full enough not to waste time on that. However I find it much harder to let employees grow in areas they are not sufficiently autonomous yet. Giving the freedom to take a more responsibility for things beyond the narrow focus of what they usually do often results in things not getting done at all or not very well.

I definitely agree on the "bang for the buck". I can't offer the amount of energy I can put in to each of 3 days for 5 days in a row.

From a few impressions in Berlin, I'd say it's possible and also not that unusual.

At a startup I worked in the past, a now-friend of mine came in as a freelance-PM for a few months and also helped setting up the PM process. The time he was there probably the most productive period at that startup feature-wise. If that is also something you can provide I would say that there are a lot of potential startups out there which just raised a Series A which could be interested.

At a digital agency I freelanced for I think about half the PMs were parttime PMs (some freelance, some employed). From what I've gathered from friends the situation at a lot of digital agencies is similar. Not sure how they got to that position though.

Agencies without much overtime? But I'm glad to hear you know of such places. Maybe I should move to Berlin to find some start-up to work for.

I don't have an answer for you, but I 100% support your journey. I've made the move from full time gigs to 20~ hours a week upper bound of consulting / freelancing and I couldn't ever see myself going back. Good luck!

How did you go about doing that? How do you win clients? Which field are you in? How do you present your services?

Is that 20 hours the amount of time you're billing weekly, or your total work time? I aspire to freelance one day, perhaps soon, and I've heard that non-billable work can easily add up to a full time job. Things like marketing yourself, connecting with clients, possibly administrative things to do with your business.

A little question on the side: How common is it for companies to exclude breaks from working hours? In germany you have to take a 30 minute break after 6h. Now for most companies here this makes 9to5 a 9to5:30 (a 42.5h week) and the extra 30m are unpaid.

I feel like it would be much nicer for everyone to just price those minutes in and leave after 8h (no good work happens in those extra 30m I bet).

Your question didn't talk about your career aspirations, as those items would influence the type of PM position that you are seeking and the level of commitment that you would make to it. I'm also assuming that this is software PM.

Let me provide some of my background and our philosophy on PM, maybe some of these perspectives will alter your point of view.

I am currently CEO of WSO2, #1 integration OSS company and #7 OSS software company. We will do around $50M in sales this year, most of that being subscriptions which are growing roughly 60%. We are profitable and cash flow positive. We have 400 people in technology roles, and at any point in time we have 4 full time PMs and another 15 people acting in PM roles.

Prior to my job at WSO2, I was CEO / Founder of Codenvy, which was bought by Red Hat last year, and we grew to just under 50 people. And prior to that, I had spent roughly 10 years working in various PM roles on software products related to Java, .NET, systems management, virtualization and containers - essentially, devops and middleware are concentrations.

Software is a creative industry - much like the moving industry. Every release of a software product is an opportunity to redefine your company's position within a marketplace. Engineers are like actors, and PMs are like directors. And the PMs work with a wide range of supporting individuals to make each release of the software as successful as possible. The movie process is similar.

Since software is a creative activity, it can be argued that the success of software products are tied to the passion and commitment that their leaders attribute to their fashioning. Many software products are the result of a passion, commitment, vision, and love that are born from the inner values and beliefs of the product's leaders, which usually the PM is a strong voice.

In this regard, if the company you work for is a for profit software company, or the software project you would inherit has ambitious objectives around market share or penetration, success of the product is measured by results that require abnormal commitments from their leaders. Those commitments are increasingly hard to measure in time allocation or time slicing.

At WSO2, when one of our leaders takes on a PM role assigned to a product, it is a position of prestige. It comes usually with higher pay, more recognition, and more responsibilities. We ask our leaders to take a competitive position and to pursue victory, and then allow them to have access to broad resources and budget that they can deploy to facilitate their goals. When they take on this role, we allow them to allocate their time as they see fit, but quarterly they must stand up in front of the company during quarterly reviews to elaborate upon their results, the results of the competition, and what's next.

This type of PM is not for everyone - but the benefits can be tremendous. It was doing this sort of work that got me introduced to doing investments and acquisitions, because while at Quest, it was PMs that were the strategic drivers of potential partner / build / buy scenarios (and we did a lot of acquisitions). It also opened up opportunities for me to angle invest and join Toba Capital as a partner, for which I was able to lead investments in Codenvy, Sauce Labs, and WSO2 (for which now I am its CEO). And my CEO positions were never pushed or encouraged by the investors - in both cases, the companies looked at my PM background and asked me to get steadily more involved in the company execution.

I got serious about PM just about the age that you are now. I hope your journey proves worthwhile...

Thanks for the long reply!

How much do your PMs work on average than? I find there is always something to improve and to work on. I can't see where I could find a reasonable line to draw on what gets done and what not. Or is the role of the PM narrow enough that the teams throughput is the bottleneck?

Your answer actually presses on a core motive for why I want to go part-time. Bluntly said: I'm mostly in it for the money and just enough to comfortably get by (I'm still enthusiastic about any arising challenges and I think I'm seen as a motivated employee, too). There are two reasons for this:

1. I want to have room to educate myself further. I e.g. find it hard to research and learn at the job, where urgent much too often gets prioritized before important. Within my responsibilities I can of course set the focus my way, but in the bigger picture it's much harder to convince upper management to focus on important, not urgent. I'm sure though, there are companies that have a better culture here than my current employer.

2. My areas of interest are either notoriously under-payed, work-intensive to get in to or both (science, music, art, etc.). Doing any of these for a living also means compromising on the kind of science or culture you produce.

I therefore decided to find work that is intellectually stimulating at least, but not in my core interests and make room for interests, personal growth and variety on the side.

If the chance arises to combine interests and work better I will definitely take it (maybe in science there is a niche for me), but I see less of a chance there, so I don't focus on this path.

I also might find a profitable side-project that could one day replace my employment. That's another path I would like to keep open (I really like the early start-up phase and starting with a side-project doesn't require a huge financial risk or money for runway).

It's hard for me to speculate how much our PMs are working. No one in our company is micro managing the PMs and their day to day work. But usually, what happens with PMs is that they become accountable for some revenue targets, a set of releases, and a set of customers. These are all things that get scheduled or have targets which have a certain obligation / commitment that must be met. And the PMs just go on about doing that work.

When dealing with incredibly technical products that you are a PM for, almost all of the PMs have a strong passion for the area that they are involved. So there is a blending with personal growth and the products that they are responsible for. I personally am one of a couple PMs on one of our new initiatives at WSO2 where we have 150 engineers. I'm doing it because the technology area is in a domain that excites me, so it does border on being a hobby almost, and therefore I do not count the hours or dollar for dollar pay as much.

Yes if the role is small enough.

PM is usually quite central I fear.

My thought process if I've seen great product managers oversee several products full time. Usually there's some kind of connection between them. If any one of them said, "Can you pay me a third just to oversee one of them" their boss would easily say Yes. But it helps to have the track record first.

Similarly, if a company (or product line) only has 2 or 3 engineers, who already know the problem domain, product management doesn't have to be huge.

Now I understand. Thanks!