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Run the project: phases, scope, dates, risks and acceptance.
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Work with the product owner on what gets built and in what order. Every new idea is priced against what it displaces, and you propose the simpler version that ships.
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Price every change request before it goes into the plan.
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Keep delivery inside the contract: monthly caps, the not-to-exceed limit, and a signed change order before work goes over.
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Talk to the client directly on regular calls, demos and requirement sessions.
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Write requirements and test the logic on prototypes before development starts.
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Check everything AI-generated before it reaches the client.
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Run the team's flow end to end: backlog, QA capacity, bug triage, and what the agent pipeline costs in time and tokens.
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Decide with the team where a model belongs in the product, where a person reviews its output and what it costs to run.
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Lead syncs, set tasks and give the team feedback.
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Own estimates, hours, invoices and plan against actual.
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Report to the CEO and raise risks early.
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5+ years managing software projects, 2 of them on a complex web product or SaaS.
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Product judgment: you have cut scope, sequenced an MVP and said no to a stakeholder while keeping the relationship.
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Technical ground: web architecture, APIs, data models, integrations, migrations, CI/CD and testing.
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Cloud and enterprise delivery: AWS or similar, environments and releases, monitoring, and what enterprise clients expect on hosting, security and uptime.
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Experience running time-and-materials contracts with monthly caps or a not-to-exceed limit.
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Claude Code, Codex or a similar tool in your daily work. You build prototypes yourself and check what the agents write.
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Direct work with US clients, English at C1.
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You can tell a client "yes, and it adds 2 weeks" or "no, but here is what we can do".
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Requirements a developer can build from without coming back to ask.