A Day in the Life of A Project Manager: Meet Brittany Guy
Today we’re continuing with our Day in the Life series introducing you to our team.
In this installment, we dig in with Brittany Guy, Steadfast’s rockstar project manager. Brittany comes from a marketing background, but has stepped up in a big way as our project manager, wearing a number of hats, and supporting clients and developers in myriad ways.
She brings a bright, optimistic outlook to every element of our process. We cannot say enough about how her outlook and personality lifts our projects and puts every step on the right foot as we move through the good and bad moments in any given project.
So, without further ado, here is Brittany Guy, Steadfast Project Manager:
What is your morning routine? How has that changed during the pandemic?
I get up, immediately make some coffee, and try to get some reading in before I start screen time. If it’s a good day I get in a backyard workout or a walk with my dog.
Then I hop on about 30 minutes before my first call of the day (our engineering stand up) to make my to-do list. I try to focus when I do this and not send any messages out yet - though it’s very tempting. Once I have my to-do list set I tackle my inbox and slack messages.
Because of the pandemic, I’ve had to get very strict with my mornings. I don’t leave the house anymore, and if I wake up and immediately hop online my days feel very long and all blend into one another. I’ve had to fight to create boundaries and set up my work time with strict start/end times.
Give us the quick version of your role at Steadfast. What are your responsibilities? What are you focused on?
I focus on project management and operations. My job is to facilitate the work my team needs to do - anything I can do to make their lives easier. We have very talented developers on our team and my focus is making sure their time is spent doing what they do best - developing.
I have the most client-facing role on the team. I structure and often lead client calls, handle email communications, and manage and update our project management software. We really value transparency at Steadfast so we set up Kanban boards or something similar so our clients can watch progress in realtime. This requires a lot of work to keep updated. I handle hours tracking, invoicing, writing Statements of Work and collaborate with our Director of Engineering to assign work and determine team capacity.
On any given day, where do you end up spending most of your time?
Slack, Jira, and Trello. (What would we do without Slack?)
On a good day on productive calls. On a not so good day, non-productive calls, but we’ve pretty much eliminated those. It’s horrific to calculate the cost of each meeting using each team member’s billable rate and that has made me allergic to pointless calls.
What is your favorite tool that you use daily?
Slack. But also Trello. It’s incredibly intuitive and perfect for our clients. It’s requires no onboarding time and is easy to track changing requirements and facilitate bug reporting + client QA.
What is the best possible lunch on a Wednesday?
Fish Tacos or a salad from Cenote.
What is your go-to happy hour beverage?
Paloma or Ranch water
If you could change one thing to improve the software development process, community, or industry, what is that change and how would that make your life better and other people’s lives better?
More women in tech, and empowering girls to learn and choose career paths in STEM from an early age. I stumbled into the software world after feeling too inadequate to be a developer or work on any non-front end projects for quite some time. It wasn’t even an option for me even though I grew up in a household of engineers. Now I realize those feelings were limiting and all it takes is some self confidence and hard work to break in. We need more free kids coding camps and mentoring!
At the end of the day, what is success for you?
When we deliver a project to a happy client and it feels like a true partnership. And just as important as the deliverables - that our team feels equipped, supported, and satisfied with their work.