How many places have you worked where someone's said this?
For about two years I straddled being the developer and the project manager on the same projects. Never officially. Nobody really believed in dedicated project managers at the time. It started as something I drifted into – a bit of client comms here, a bit of timeline management there. The kind of thing that happens when you're the only developer on the team, happy to answer the work phone.
Looking back, I probably should have figured it out sooner. When a build wasn't coming together, I knew what to do. Knuckle down, use the tools I had and kick it up a gear when a deadline was getting close.
When a stakeholder added to the scope three weeks before launch though – that's the one that kept me up 😅 Not because I didn't think it was doable. But because I could see it coming before it happened, and I found myself more interested in solving that problem than the technical one.
One project stands out in hindsight. It was a suite of quiz-based mobile apps for a pub group with a lot of brands. On that one I was just writing code. On others I was coordinating with the client too – and I couldn't help noticing I was far more energised by those challenges than the technical ones. The opposite of what I'd have expected when starting out my career studying as a web designer all those years ago.
My team lead eventually gave me an ultimatum to focus solely on code again. But by then the transition had already happened, and I knew I wasn't capable of going back.
I'd love to know if anyone else had a similar route into project management.