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We have a relatively small team of developers with less than 5 people in it and a project manager. What do you think is the typical set of responsibilities a project manager should have in such a team ? I am looking at the thing more from the developer's perspective and want to know what should I expect from the manager and what should I care about myself (e.g. code quality, coordination etc.).

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In short: get things out of developers' way.

In more detail:

  1. All typical project management stuff shouldn't take anywhere close to full time job in such a small team, so PM should deal with all standard PM tasks: formal communication (especially with customer if you have one), dealing with stakeholders, organizing work on general level (I don't say they should tell developers how to code), managing requirements, dealing with priority changes etc.

  2. Additionally there are tasks which PM can deal with and usually do it well. I'd say that PMs are very good testers on average. I mean all sorts of functional tests here. That's because they usually know very well what the project is all about and how specific features should be developed to fulfill client's requirements well. What they lack in knowledge about QA (if they do) they make up for with knowledge about project.

  3. Another thing like that is documentation. A type of documentation really depends on a project but most likely you need either something for administrators, users or both. When I think about documentation I mean things like on-line helps too.

  4. User support. Again, level of support you need depends on a project but if you build some self-hosted web-app addressed directly for end-users you'll have some questions, bug submissions and feature requests altogether somewhere in your support inbox. Someone has to deal with it and a PM is way better candidate than a developer. If you work on a custom project for big customer there will also be some of these but then it is usually more formalized and goes to standard project management tasks.

  5. Team management. It is not unusual in this kind of teams that PM is also a line manager. However it shouldn't be related with them being a PM but rather with having best managerial skills in the team.

  6. Sale/marketing support. With small team it is likely you don't have a big team of salespeople trying to push your stuff to target market and sale process either requires some subject matter experts talking about the project (selling project to companies) or marketing effort to reach end-users with your app (selling application directly to end-users). In small teams most of the time PM is a best candidate to do so.

Note, it all much depends on who do you have on board. I haven't mentioned things like working on best development practices (although I personally do this too) since you stated you can take care of this stuff. Anyway it all comes down to the people. PM in general should cover all gaps you have in the team, either with their own hands if they have enough time or by getting more people to the team.

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You cannot undervalue the role of a PM, even for a small sized project. While we assume this is more simple because you have only five or so resources, it could still be a complex project, dealing with complex procurement issues, very tough customer, environment or legal concerns, etc. I have found that in small teams a PM is named who is largely a functional/technical SME and not someone who has strong PM and/or leadership skills. And the PM rigor suffers accordingly. (I am not saying that a SME cannot be a strong PM, typically they just have not had time to build this level of competency when they're assigned to manage a small project, I have found.)

So I agree the PM tasks will not consume a full FTE, as Pawel suggested, but I would ensure the PM rigor is up to speed and is appropriate for the complexity of the project before I assign other roles to the PM. Then pitching in where needed is appropriate.

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Essentially a PM role in a small team is the same as in a larger team ("What do project managers do all day?").

The difference is that they are not likely to have any admin or support staff and more than likely to either run several projects at once or wear multiple hats within the team.

Wearing multiple hats in software development can mean programming, writting specs, eliciting requirements, QA, covering for other business functions: sales, marketing, public relations, office management, payroll and et cetara. All of this in addition to managing the project itself.

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know your customer know your team understand the right level of quality make sure the product beats the customer's expectation

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