"We don't need project managers"

"We don't need project managers, you can manage it yourself." How many places have you worked where someone's said that? If you've been in digital for more than five years, I'd put money on at least one, and I'd put slightly more money on it being said with total confidence by someone who had never personally updated a timeline in their life.

I heard it early in my career, at an agency where nobody really believed in dedicated project managers. And here's the thing that took me years to properly understand: the belief was optional, but the work wasn't. The client comms still needed doing. The timelines still needed managing. Scope still needed watching. When a company decides it doesn't need project managers, the project management doesn't stop happening. It just pools around whoever is standing nearest, and gets done part-time, unofficially, and usually badly.

I was standing nearest. I was the only developer on the team, and I was happy to answer the work phone, which it turns out is how careers actually start. Not with a plan. With a phone nobody else wanted to pick up.

Two jobs, one desk

For about two years I straddled being the developer and the project manager on the same projects. Never officially. It started as drift: a bit of client comms here, a bit of timeline management there. The kind of accumulation that happens so gradually you don't notice you've become a different job title until someone asks what you actually do and your answer takes a full minute.

Looking back, I probably should have figured out what was happening sooner, because the evidence was fairly loud. When a build wasn't coming together, I knew exactly what to do. Knuckle down, use the tools I had, kick it up a gear when the deadline got close. A familiar problem with a familiar shape, and the solving of it felt like work.

But when a stakeholder added to the scope three weeks before launch, that's the one that kept me up at night. And not because I didn't think it was doable. It was doable. What got me was that I could see it coming before it happened, the way you can see two people walking towards the same doorway, and I found myself far more interested in solving that problem than the technical one. The code would still be there tomorrow. The collision was happening now.

Energy is the tell

One project stands out in hindsight: a suite of quiz-based mobile apps for a pub group with a lot of brands. On that one I was just writing code. Heads down, build the thing. On other projects I was coordinating with the client as well, and I couldn't help noticing I was far more energised by those challenges than the technical ones. Which was the exact opposite of what I'd have expected when I started my career studying as a web designer all those years ago.

This is the bit I'd underline for anyone earlier in their career, because it took me too long to trust it. Aptitude is a bad compass. You can be genuinely good at things that quietly drain you, and the world will happily keep handing you more of them, because being good at something is all the evidence anyone else needs. Energy is more honest. Watch which problems follow you home. Notice which ones you're still turning over in the shower. Mine were never the technical ones, even when the technical ones were harder, and that pattern was telling me something years before I listened.

The ultimatum

Eventually my team lead gave me an ultimatum: focus solely on code again. I don't think it was meant as a career intervention. It was meant as a correction, a tidy-up of a role that had gone blurry. But it worked as a diagnosis, because it forced a binary I'd been comfortably avoiding. Pick one.

And by then the transition had already happened. Not on paper, not in my job title, but somewhere more important. I knew I wasn't capable of going back. Not unwilling. Not capable. The two years of straddling had rewired what I paid attention to, and you can't un-notice the doorway collisions once you've started seeing them.

I've been grateful for that ultimatum ever since, in the slightly grudging way you're grateful to anyone who forces a decision you were too comfortable to make yourself. Drift got me into project management, but drift would never have made me commit to it. Sometimes you need someone to hold up the fork in the road and refuse to let you keep walking down the middle.

The unofficial route is the common one

Here's what I've learned since, from years of asking other PMs how they got in: almost nobody chose this off a careers poster. The typical route is exactly the shape mine was. You were a developer, a designer, a copywriter, and the coordination work pooled around you because you were the one who answered the phone. You did it unofficially for a while. Then something, an ultimatum, a restructure, a job ad you couldn't stop reading, forced you to admit what you'd already become.

So if you're currently the person doing two jobs from one desk, unofficially, in a place that's told you it doesn't need project managers: pay attention to which half keeps you up at night. That's not stress. That's information.

I'd love to know if anyone else had a similar route in. My suspicion is that "similar route" describes most of us, and the ones with a plan are the exception.