Hire your AI project manager

Sprints, standups, unblocks, and honest timelines — run by chat.

Updated 2026-04-18

This is a role guide, not an installed employee. It explains what the role owns and how Tycoon runs it. Nothing is hired or activated until you choose it.

What your AI Project Manager does

01Run the weekly sprint plan: scope, assign, and publish a realistic delivery forecast
02Daily standup synthesis: what shipped, what's blocked, who needs what
03Track every ticket from spec to live; flag anything drifting past commitment dates
04Write status updates to customers about promised features on a regular cadence
05Keep the dependency graph clean — nothing sits blocked on a missing decision for 3 days
06Produce the weekly ship log for the founder and the Monday briefing
07Coordinate the cross-functional launches (feature + docs + blog + email + ads)
08Post-release retros on anything that shipped late, with a concrete lesson logged

Workflows on autopilot

Weekly sprint plan

Monday morning: reads last week's output, reviews the backlog against priorities from Manager, proposes this week's sprint scope with honest confidence intervals.

Daily async standup

Every morning pulls ticket state, PR status, and overnight messages. Posts a 6-line summary: shipped, in flight, blocked, help-needed, customer commitments, risk.

Blocker escalation

Any ticket blocked for 48 hours auto-escalates with context, the likely unblock path, and a named owner for the next move. No silent stalls.

Customer commitment tracking

Every promise made to a customer lands in a tracker. Sends a proactive update when the estimated date slips, with revised ETA and reason — before the customer asks.

Cross-functional launch checklist

A feature ships only after the checklist is green: code, docs, blog, email, in-app banner, support prep, rollback plan. Coordinates with AI CMO, AI SEO Editor, and AI DevOps Engineer.

Retro on slip

Any ticket that ships >2 days late gets a 5-minute retro: root cause, pattern match to prior slips, one concrete change for next time. Logged in the decisions doc.

Without vs With a AI Project Manager

Without

  • Sprint plans live in a doc that nobody reads after Tuesday
  • Customers find out features are late when they check in themselves
  • Tickets rot in 'blocked' for a week before the owner even notices
  • A PM hire costs $140K and half their time is status updates
  • Retros happen quarterly and nobody remembers what actually slipped

With Tycoon

  • Sprint state is live and everyone knows what's on fire without asking
  • Proactive updates go out the moment the date starts slipping
  • 48-hour blocker escalation with a named owner for the next move
  • AI PM runs the mechanics for a fraction of the cost, freeing a human for product strategy
  • Small retros after every slip, patterns emerge within 30 days

A day in the life of your AI Project Manager

08:00Daily standup synthesis: 3 PRs shipped overnight, 2 tickets moved to review, 1 blocked on a missing design decision. Escalates the blocker with a proposed resolution.
10:00Customer commitment check: 'SAML SSO' promised to Acme by Friday slipped to Monday due to backend dependency. Drafts the update email for founder review.
12:00New feature launch checklist: 'team invites' is code-complete but missing docs and in-app tour. Loops in AI SEO Editor and AI UI Designer with deadline.
14:30Runs the mid-week sprint check: 70% of committed scope on track, 2 items at risk, 1 already descoped. Flags to CEO with a recommendation.
16:00Retro on last week's slipped ticket: root cause was unclear API contract, pattern repeats from 3 weeks ago. Proposes a 'contract review' checkpoint in the backend engineer workflow.
18:00Closes day: weekly ship log updated, tomorrow's standup queued, 2 customer updates drafted.

Tools your AI Project Manager uses

Linear, Jira, or Shortcut as the source of truth for ticketsSlack or Discord for async standup and escalationNotion for specs, decisions, and retrosFigma for cross-referencing design statusGitHub for PR status correlationGoogle Calendar for release windows and customer commitmentsIntercom or Front for customer-facing update threadsTycoon skill marketplace for sprint, standup, and status-update skills
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.

Don't engineers hate PMs who nag them?

They hate PMs who nag without context. The AI Project Manager pulls ticket state, PR status, and CI results before sending any nudge, so every ask has the why attached ('this is the blocker on the customer commitment we made to Acme, ETA Friday'). Engineers report the AI PM is less annoying than a human PM because it never forgets context, never pings during focus time without reason, and handles the low-value status-update work that engineers dislike answering. Most teams onboarding the AI PM see standups compress from 20 minutes to 3.

Can it run sprint planning without me?

For most weeks, yes. The AI Project Manager reads last week's output, reviews the backlog against priorities from the Manager, proposes a sprint with honest confidence intervals, and ships it to the team. You review the proposal in 3 minutes and sign off. Exceptions — strategic pivots, unusually high-risk weeks, customer-driven scope changes — come to you with a clear recommendation. In practice founders spend about 10 minutes per week on sprint planning instead of the hour a human PM would consume.

How does it handle unclear priorities?

It refuses to invent them. When the backlog and the Manager's weekly plan don't answer 'what matters most this week', the AI Project Manager writes a one-line ambiguity escalation ('unclear whether the Acme commitment or the churn fix takes precedence') and pauses sprint planning until you answer. This is deliberate — a bad sprint plan costs a week of wasted work, and a 5-minute founder decision prevents it. The AI PM never ships a plan that pretends to be more certain than it is.

Does it work for async and distributed teams?

It works best for them. The AI Project Manager runs entirely on async signals (tickets, PRs, Slack messages, commits) and produces written summaries that span time zones. Teams in San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Tokyo can share a single sprint with synthesized handoffs instead of live standups. For fully sync teams, it can run live standups too, but most founders find the async version is a productivity gain rather than a downgrade — meetings get replaced by 6-line daily summaries and people get their mornings back.

Can it manage external contractors or agencies?

Yes, with a caveat. It treats external collaborators as first-class team members — pings them for updates, tracks their deliverables, escalates when they miss. The caveat: contractors often have their own workflows, and the AI respects them. If your agency uses Asana and your team uses Linear, the AI PM syncs the two views rather than forcing migration. What it won't do: manage billing disputes, renegotiate scope, or fire a contractor — those remain founder decisions. What it will do: make sure you have the information to make those decisions on time.

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