WHAT GOES WRONG · LESSON 08.02intermediate

PM antipatterns — the hero, the rescue, the death march.

Patterns that look like leadership but corrode the team.

↳ tl;dr

Antipatterns are dysfunctional patterns mistaken for solutions. Three to recognize: the Hero PM (does it all themselves), the Rescue (parachutes in late to "save" a project), and the Death March(Yourdon's name for projects designed to fail).

The Hero PM

Owns every decision personally. Works late. Fixes blockers themselves. Looks heroic for a quarter. Then the team is dependent on them, no one else can step in, and the PM burns out. Heroics solve a sprint; they create the failure mode of the year.

The Rescue

A senior PM parachutes into a struggling project to "save it." If they actually fix it, leadership concludes the old PM was the problem. Often the old PM was a symptom; the rescue treats the symptom. The team learns to wait for rescues instead of asking for help when small.

The Death March

Yourdon's 1997 coinage. A project where the schedule, the scope, or the team is at least 50% off what's reasonable — and everyone knows it. People work nights and weekends. The PM's job becomes triage, not leadership. Yourdon's uncomfortable observation: most software professionals will experience at least one death march, and the framework for surviving it is different from the framework for running a healthy project.

↳ spotting a death march early

Three signs: (1) The schedule was fixed before scope was understood. (2) Asking for more time produces moral judgment, not analysis. (3) The PM stops being asked for input and starts being told what to commit to. Once any of these is true, you're in one — manage it as such.

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