I went to a PM for help and left with more work
Some bad PMs are easy to spot. They miss deadlines, lose track of budgets, forget who's doing what. Those ones get found out eventually.
Thoughts from a former Developer turned PM
The most useful word in my standups was "no" (I didn't mean it)
For a while, my favourite part of our tribe standups was saying no to perfectly reasonable requests.
Your best idea is the wrong idea (right now)
There's a particular moment in every fire I've ever fought.
Be nice to people you don't need (yet)
Most of what made me a decent PM, I picked up before I was a PM.
Your best developer probably thinks they're winging it
Some of the best developers I've worked with were quietly convinced they weren't very good.
Your team doesn't need to know the building's on fire
Somewhere along the way, transparency became a PM virtue nobody's allowed to question. Share everything. Keep the team in the loop. Let them see the whole picture.
The localisation checklist for multilingual website launches
The thing I couldn't find when I started was a straight, practical list of what actually needs deciding, in what order, written by someone who had done it rather than someone selling translation services.
What I do in the first 30 days of a new role
You were hired because you know how to run things, so it feels like the job starts on day one, ideally with a process improvement and a new tool by Friday.
How to estimate a website build when there is no spec yet
"I know there's no spec yet, but can you just give me a rough number?"
Nobody has ever read your RACI
It was built in week one, shared in the kick-off deck, saved in the project folder, and it has not been opened since.
What to say instead
There's a genre of LinkedIn post that always does well: things PMs say versus what they actually mean.
Working dyslexic in a words job
I chose a words job with a brain that charges me a toll on words. Here's what that's actually like, where it started, and the one opinion about it that tends to surprise people.
Why your estimate was right and the project was still late
The estimates are exhumed and examined, and the strange thing is, they were mostly fine.
The status meeting that manufactures surprises
In an earlier article about learning from bad managers, one line kept coming back to me afterwards: if people only ever report good news to you, you have built a reporting system that manufactures surprises.
The Scope Creep dictionary
Learning the job is partly learning this language, and nobody hands you the dictionary.
How to step on toes (and be thanked for it)
The corporate version says stay in your lane, the hustle version says ask forgiveness not permission, but there's a third way.
The project management books worth finishing
Project management books are about work: why it's late, where it queues, what it actually costs, and why adding help makes it worse.
I launched the same website, not once but five times
Same product, same company, same team, same process.
The most important delivery tool I built was a spreadsheet
Not an AI system. Not a project management platform. Not a custom-built operations tool.
What I actually use AI for as a PM
Here's what I actually use it for on a Tuesday (because most of every Monday you're stuck in a meeting).