11 Red Flags Of Failing Web Development Project Management

Note: I’m sure all make mistakes. And any of these issues can show up in a healthy environment, as long as they are being actively resolved to improve teamwork. But sometimes it’s just part of ongoing toxic environment.

Let me know in comments if you’ve ever encountered, or currently are in any of these situations. I think this is more common than we realize.

If most of these flags are present. Consider starting to work on a way out.

1. Overly positive or excited attitude about the project. (We are building next Amazon, or next Robinhood!)
2. Justifying why their app is better, usually by saying that their features do things different (smarter, more useful) than existing competitor’s app. (Here’s the punch line: Before even implementing those features.)
3. Dramatic work tracking medium. Today you are completing tasks in Trello board. Tomorrow it’s reporting to a #completed-tasks Slack channel, or Bugzilla. Next week it’s Jira, or GitHub comments, etc.
4. Team made up of family members, relatives or school friends.
5. Expresses how great you are as a developer, and how glad they are to have you on their team, you’re a rare hard to find dev, etc.
6. Adds features “on the fly” because it seems like it should be next step.
7. No awareness of technical limitations. Just slap features on top of existing code base.
8. No awareness of technical difficulty (is it possible? will it scale?) Who cares just add that feature into the UI.
9. Imbalanced focus on UI aesthetics and UX over actual functionality. Privileges UI work over serverside. “Just make it look this way, because that’s what makes the app work right?” (Wrong. Fast and efficient core API back-end functionality should be done first. Even if it means no visual results for weeks or 1–2 months. Then build UI based on it.)
10. Only focus on next glorious feature, next big improvement, never on devious errors or bugs. (That come back to bite you later before project hits the ground hard and left in shambles.)
11. The weird alternation between overloading the most talented developer on the team with work outside of their primary expertise (React app UI component structure, Loading API data, for example) but also assigning insignificant tasks to them (Change “companyName” to “CompanyName”) which can be done by anyone with any experience level.