Software development project management is very similar to other types of project management. It involves a lot of interpersonal communication, planing, and organizing. Here we just want to mention a few we believe to be key tasks that a software development project manager should pay attention to for a successful software development project.

Understanding of project requirements

The project manager should have a solid understanding of the goals of the projects. They should be able to make decisions about what feature should be implemented when and what the expected outcomes are. 

Communication

The project manager needs to maintain constant communication with the development team. They should always know what features are currently being implemented, what the hold ups are, and what the projected timeline is. This is necessary so that nothing gets forgotten or overlooked when approving finished features. 

Meetings

The project manager should make sure there are regular meetings with the development team. In an agile development environment, a new iteration typically starts every 1 to 4 weeks. At least at the beginning of each iteration, there should be a meeting in which the outcomes of the previous iteration and the tasks for the next iteration are discussed. Those meetings should be kept to the point, especially if developers are present in the meetings (which is often recommended), since they usually have the least desire to be in those meetings. They just want to go back to coding.

Issue-tracking system

It is highly recommended to use an issue-tracking system to manage the tasks for the developers. Those systems typically let users create "tickets" that describe a task (e.g. "a user should be able to edit their profile" or "when I click on button X the follow error occurs") that can then be assigned a priority and be put in the queue to be worked on. Issue-tracking systems can be pretty complex and might need some getting used to. A project manager should be willing to learn how to use them.

Software development

A project manager if not already knowledgable in software development should be willing to acquire the necessary knowledge to understand what the development team is doing. That doesn't mean they need to learn how to program or develop software, but they should be willing learn key terms (such as "deploy" or "staging") and ask for explanations if they don't understand something said by the development team. They should be willing to understand the architecture of the system that is being built (at least to an extent), so that they can make informed decisions and ask the right questions.