He also meets with the team in china in his own and here as well. I don’t want to be just some secretary to remind him of things. How can I be effective and actually help him out in this kind of environment? I just started a couple of weeks ago and feel like I have my hands tied. The company develops and manufactures IoT hardware. He has to approve all the schematics and everything

I saw this role in Linkedin and got surprised about how someone would trust a PMO working under those conditions:

What You'll Bring:

• 7+ years of program or technical project management experience on complex, cross-functional technology initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a single, accountable owner across ambiguous, multi-team programs.
• High judgment — you know which decisions to advance, which to make, and which to delegate, and you get those calls right under uncertainty.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a strong bias toward simplification. You cut through complexity rather than adding to it, and your default is the simplest solution that works.
• Proven track record working with non-technical business partners — setting expectations, delivering clear status updates, and holding programs accountable to outcomes they can act on.
• Hands-on experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or equivalent) on the operational and program management work— professional or personal — in real work, not just experimentation. You should be able to speak to how AI changes the way you work.
• Experience managing vendor relationships and third-party implementation programs, including change-management risk.
• Hands-on experience with Agile delivery, sprint planning, backlog management, and Jira or equivalent tooling.
• Strong written communication skills to convey technical complexity succinctly.
• Comfort working in a setting where contracts guide the workflow.
• Track record of managing programs through multiple concurrent system transitions.

Nice to Have:

• Experience in AI-first or agent-first operating models.
• Experience assessing build versus buy options and providing organized leadership advice.
• Background with creative production, digital asset management, or approval workflow systems.
• Familiarity with Smartsheet or similar platforms and their integration capabilities.
• Background in game, media, publishing, or consumer products industries.
• Familiarity with engineering observability and flow-metric tooling as program-management signal sources.

What do you think? Do you see that kind of use for the AI in your industry? I may be too traditional, so I would like to know if you find this role normal and how you would handle the work in that "AI-first" environment.

Thanks

Just got back from 3 weeks of paternity leave. Even after climbing out of a pit of 450 unread emails, I still feel like I’m an utterly clueless mess.

Any recommendations, tips or tricks on how best to get back up to speed?

Hello, I'm seeking advice on how to handle project management when everyone involved outranks you? That's the TL;DR.

Here is additional context if you'd like to know more details:

I'm an Individual Contributor (IC) in a technical role. I was asked to lead a technical project earlier this year involving various teams that spans our entire infrastructure. This is a great development opportunity, but I'm struggling with the coordination and people-management side.

I'm junior compared to all the other people involved. The project includes my boss, ICs from other teams, and senior subject-matter experts. I'm accountable for coordinating the project, but don't have authority over people who own the remaining work.

Most outstanding tasks depend on action from other teams or my manager. I have documented this in our project channel, submitted tickets, and requested assistance. I thought this was sufficient, but I recently received feedback that my project communication needs improvement because my updates became less frequent and I was told this contributed to delays.

I plan to improve my communication based on that feedback and establish a regular reporting schedule. One thing I'm unsure about is how to manage overdue or blocked tasks when the owners of next steps are more senior than I am. I don't want to overstep, but waiting for responses has not worked.

This leads back to my question. What would you recommend a junior IC do to coordinate work owned by more senior stakeholders?

Thank you!

Joined a new org (finally) at a much lower title and salary then I had (Tis the market of today)....

They have PM's and BA's rolling up in the same org. Now, having been at the Director level for sometime I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the role a BA is meant to fulfill on a project and/or items to provide for the Project Manager. Nope, turns out I'm an "Asshole who wants everyone to do their work for them!"

My understanding is pretty simple: As a BA, your role is to identify and define what the business needs to reach a solution for the <problem>. Opposite of that, I as the PM determine how the work is organized and drive it forward towards a solution for said business need.

With that understanding, if you've been on the project for three months and I am on-boarding. It is perfectly reasonable of an expectation that when I ask you:

PM: "What requirements need to be met, which stakeholders are involved in those requirements, are there any gaps, dependencies or outstanding decisions?"

Your response should damn well not be:

BA: "Well, we need the Project Plan & Timeline to answer those questions. Can you get it done please?"

---
No, abso-fucking-loutely not. I'm not the subject matter expert. Sure, let me just "psychic-like" pull a vision of exactly how this delivery should work technically and exactly how long it takes in a multi-discipline project I wasn't involved with the Discovery of. It's YOUR responsibility to tell ME what is/has been defined a requirement so that I can build those artifacts, not the other way around.

Found out this BA was telling her boss I was trying to shanghai her with my role responsibilities, I (along with the Ops SVP) tore her and her boss a new ass first thing this morning.

---

Now for the record, can I do Discovery and answer all those questions? Oh absolutely, we've all done it at one time or another. Am I going to when someone is paid 105k salary to do only that? Not a chance. I swear the PM discipline is going down the damn drain.../rant.

one thing i still find difficult is when every stakeholder says their request is urgent.

the team obviously can’t treat everything as the highest priority, but simply asking people to choose what matters most doesn’t always work

i’m curious how experienced pm’s handle this without turning every prioritisation discussion into an argument

do you use a specific framework, ask for trade-offs, or let stakeholders decide between themselves?

I work for a small company as as project manager for software development, since the projects I'm assigned is ending soon, one of the managing partners told me I will be assigned to work in a another project for other company that one of the other managing partners has.

The projects is related to security compliance, not sure if you have heard of GovRamp, but it is basically to comply in different controls and provide evidence for each so you are elegible to work in government projects . And if you are familiar with GovRamp it is a lot of work to gather all the evidence and create the narratives to support it. So far I've managed to get 3 control completed but I'm completely lost and I dont think I will be able to get all this done. For most of the controls I dont know or understand what evidence to provide plus I need help to get this evidence from the engineering team to get that for me.

How can I tell the managing partner that this is a really big endeavor, and that I don't have the expertise on this to do it all by myself. I already left him a DM telling him that we need at least weekly sessions and start using some kind of PM tool (like Jira) to keep track of each control and document the evidence but I didn't get any response. I feel they are expecting to work on this by myself. My perception was that I would be a facilitator and coordinate the evidence gathering and meeting with the folks that review but seems I will be doing all the work

Anyone with GovRamp experience has done this before? Is it manageable for one PM to do it? Also how can I communicate this to my boss and dont sound that I dont want it to myself

So it's the final day for me to wrap up resubmitting my teams GMP. The gag its only me.

What started out as a team of 4, now is two, except I have a new senior PM that just came onboard. Two of my teammates had to move to other projects after we finished our submission, leaving me (a PM1) and my senior PM to handle the comments and resubmission. However, there was a lot of misunderstandings between us that escalated, however i handled the situation diplomatically (and my boss backed me up). What started out as just collecting new pricing from select bidders as my sole task, to me handling the entire GMP alone--unbeknownst to me. My old senior PM transitioned internally to another team and whenever I asked about packages she knew about i was stonewalled. I was badgered to keep both my PMs in the loop and suddenly I was reprimanded for having the old PM in the emails, she told me that she'll ignore them. When it came to the due date, I was questioned for not updating the comments, review the pricing, the spreadsheet, and budget. I was utterly confused as I was literally blocked from opening documents to enter things in and I was never told to handle tasks outside of "get pricing" even when I asked what how we were handling them.

Idk if this is some kind of test to see if I'm capable or petty retaliation to be the fall guy. I simply find it messed up that a $70M contract is being handled by 1 person regardless of its stage. It's whatever though, I'm handling it the best way I can.

We typically use Jira user stories to track different work items. In a specific project that I’m working on, the data analyst from my team creates Power BI reports and dashboards. So the issue I face is that the data analyst lets me know she will complete a particular report on that day. Following which I update my team about that but the client side is like that doesn’t mean the user story is complete, we will have feedback. The thing is it was already sent for a revision. With multiple revisions, it looks like the user story is incomplete, whereas the data analyst is completing the reports per the requirement. How can this process be optimized to show that user stories are getting completed by the agreed target due date and also welcome the endless feedback.

I have teams recording all the meetings I lead. It’s been driving crazy that using AI actually triggers my OCD and I just can’t use the ai notes it creates because almost always, they have a couple of minor errors that I can’t shake off. Plus I don’t like how “wordy” the ai summaries are. My team members confirmed that they don’t read teams generated summaries sent by PM.

This is my process

- I focus on the conversation during the meeting and take notes.
- I get ai summary.
- I compare it to my notes but mind you my projects are VERY complex. I frequently need to go back to the recording and verify the details.
- I simplify the ai summary, using ai. It spits out much better notes. I fix quite a few details (see, I still can’t trust ai!)
- then I send out the notes.

This whole process takes me at least an hour for a one hour meeting. It’s exhausting.

Any tips on how to spend less time? Any advice is welcome.

——
Wow thanks everyone for these tips! I scrambled to finish my meeting notes after I posted! I haven’t read all of them but excited to see some tips that I can hopefully implement soon. Please don’t delete your comments because I really value everyone’s experience.

One of the comments was interesting because of the question how much I’d spend without ai. I used to spend less than 30 mins for a one hour meeting. It’s because we didn’t record any of the meetings and I really trusted my note taking that I could extract all important items. Yes now I have much more complex projects but the availability of the recordings and ai summaries in a strange way worsens my imposter syndrome. I can’t let go of minute details and just hate the feeling of not getting everything right in my notes. Yes I focus on action items and decisions BUT in my case the topics are very nuanced and it’s helpful for the team to at least get a good summary after each meeting. I’ve been complimented on my summaries because they’re not the default summaries (wordy and very long) generated by ai. They want to see the “human touch.”

Are Project Managers generally expected to come across as dominant?

I recently had a mentor say that’s how most PMs are expected to behave. Is that actually true?

What are some of your best Procore stories? There have got to be some good ones out there. I'm on a project where my scope is pretty much finished but the RFIs and submittals are just killing the other consultants, mainly because ID was on a later timeline. We're just over 800 RFIs now and some of the others are joking that once we get to 1000 we have to do something to mark the occasion. Like drag the contractor through some silly submittal process just for fun and maybe a bit of payback. Not sure if we'll actually do it but fun to think about.

Just curious, what is the most challenging and/or ambiguous or largest project you have worked on?

Curious the types of challenging projects other people work on, why it was hard and how you dealt with it…

I work in a role with project management and responsibility for specific subject areas. Our team is informal, but there is still a hierarchy.

I’m also responsible for one particular topic and recently participated in a cross-department working group that is supposed to revise/improve something. My team lead was not part of the working group and didn’t attend the meeting,After the first meeting, I wanted to send a simple message to my own team summarizing what was discussed and explaining the next step. The next step is basically collecting ideas/topics, so I created a file on our shared drive and drafted a short email explaining what people should contribute.

I briefly told my manager that I was going to send the email. He then asked me to send him the draft first.

I did, but now I’ve been waiting about a day and haven’t received any feedback. I’ve never received negative feedback from him and there’s nothing inappropriate or controversial in the email.

Still, I find this really frustrating and demotivating. It’s not even an important external communication, it’s just a routine message to my own team about a topic I’m responsible for, including information that my team member would otherwise not have because they weren’t in the meeting.

It makes me wonder: Is it normal to have to get everything approved by your manager, even basic communication to your own team? Would you normally expect someone who is responsible for a topic to handle this independently?

I also sometimes get the impression that my manager would rather do everything himself. It makes me feel stupid.

Maybe I’m overthinking this, but I’d really like to hear how this would be viewed in other workplaces.

sometimes a deadline is genuinely impossible, but saying “that’s impossible” isn’t always helpful either. i’m curious how other pm’s handle this

do you negotiate scope, add resources, push the deadline, or just document the risks and move forward?

I was recently brought on within the past few months at my current position and one of the first major items given to me was the risk management for my project.

I have been getting up to speed project wise and trying to stay on top of adding risks/updating risks/following up with relevant parties for updates, but I feel like a glorified email reminder.

Being that I’m still new and under a senior I’m not in every technical meeting yet, so it feels hard to translate the day to day items to feeling like risks are being mitigated.

Any insight on how you deal with risk management is appreciated, thank you!

Not sure about anyone else, but things have been chaotic at my company. I have meetings from 8am to 5pm and still expected to get work done. I know it’s the job… but how do you cope? By 7pm I’m exhausted and can’t keep my eyes open enough to do more work. Any tips or tricks that work for you would be helpful.

Great managers aren’t born. They’re made. That’s the central idea of Julie Zhuo’s The Making of a Manager and it completely reframes how we think about leadership. A manager’s job isn’t to do all the work.

It’s to create the conditions where the team can achieve better results together.

Zhuo breaks this down into three core responsibilities: 1. Purpose Give the team clarity: → What are we trying to achieve? → Why does it matter? → What are the priorities? → What does success look like?

1. People Build a strong team by: → Hiring the right people → Building trust → Giving regular feedback → Coaching and developing others → Understanding what motivates each person

2. Process Create systems that help the team execute: → Productive meetings → Clear ownership → Strong communication → Smart prioritization → Better decision-making

As you grow as a manager, your success should increasingly be measured by what your team achieves not just by your personal output. You don’t need to have all the answers. You just need the humility to keep learning, admit mistakes, seek feedback, and improve continuously.

The real takeaway: A great manager creates clarity, builds capable people, and puts systems in place so the team can consistently deliver great outcomes. What’s one thing you’ve learned about becoming a better manager?

Hi,

As a senior SWE, I find it hard to believe the amount of high quality work that I am able to produce with AI tools like claude code. And it's not just the code output, but own the outcomes as well, when it's in production and needs monitoring and maintenance.

QA also got insanely easier with screenshot analysis for every flow and no longer relies on checking if an element exists, but is visually inspected for UX quirks.

I'm not going to argue about security implications of LLM written code, but I will say that every human-written codebase I've audited had trivial bugs, terrible query performance, occasionally even PII leaks and always a lot of technical debt, and things went into production unnoticed for years, quite literally.

With the proper experience and guidance, every coding agent out there beats a human dev now in implementing a given coding task.

But that's not the topic of this post; my question to you is, did the story points just shrink? Is my output now expected to be at this level as a bare minimum, or are you actually measuring the 10x, if not more, in output that gets communicated to stake holders?

Is planning a software project also way different now?

Sincerely appreciate anyone sharing their thoughts, and apologies if I made any typos!

Has anyone noticed themselves getting weird reactions to being very detail oriented about dates, next steps, dependencies, etc. for things outside of work and noticing people getting annoyed by this?

I don't know if it's just me but I've interacted with doctors and things like that to be particular about details and next steps and noticed an air of annoyance.

I know it's a spillover effect from work, where I want to make sure everything is super clear about timelines, details, etc. but it's like people get pissed off when you ask for details about dates and clear next steps.

The company I am currently working for has grown to the size where we will be building our own Project Management team to manage the smooth deployment of some of the more complex projects we have started to win.

We are blessed that our Sales Team is not only highly competent at a technical level, but also extremely organised and are team players, which is how we’ve managed to get by for this long. Sales Managers have typically managed the entire project, which just can’t continue with how the company has continued to grow.

The question is, has anyone gone through this experience before and can share any learnings? How do you put guardrails in place to prevent Sales trying to be Project Managers at the same time? What other issues has anyone experienced when going through this period of growth?

hi all. I’m looking to improve my ability to ask better questions in meetings that can help me with uncovering issues or lead me to have better end results. A lot of my project tends to revolve around improving existing processes and workflows. I’m often conducting key informant interviews to understand current state + future state but sometimes feel my questions only scratch the surface - if that makes sense? Or another challenge is people will share information during a meeting and I get slightly frazzled as to what to ask next. Usually when I have had some time with the information it’s easier for me to comprehend but sometimes it’s not always possible for me to have time to digest the info and then ask follow up questions in another meeting.

If any of you have frameworks, advice or books you have read that help you with this I would really appreciate it.

genuinely feels like a company-wide case of amnesia
we’ll make a call in a meeting, everyone nods, life moves on. a month later someone asks “wait why did we go with this” and it’s just tumbleweeds. the decision is documented. the reasoning? Nada, nowhere to be found. it apparently evaporated the second the meeting ended.
tried adding a “why” field to our notes template. survival rate: about 2 weeks before everyone quietly stopped filling it in bc it felt like homework nobody assigned.
so now I’m just wondering if this is a universal PM curse or if some of you have actually cracked it

Hi,

Some context, I was a technical integration consultant that for some reason because of lack resources, I am pulled into a project where I need to manage the change of 15+ systems integrating to our ERP. So, I am not sure if my job now is managing project and I am new to this. Now, I am in a tight deadline.

Now, this change is specifically to 1 system (where this system is managed by an external vendor) where there will be a change in the user interface (screen). The stakeholders have agreed on the approach (a new field in the system will be added to store additional information), but they haven't seen precisely what change will happen, which report will be updated, how new data will be created and so on.

Now the vendor has gone back with the list of changes that will be done. Should I go back to the stakeholders to get their approval of the specific change to be done? FYI, the stakeholders are difficult to deal with.

The way I see, I believe I need to get their approval but I would risk going a few round of discussion risking the project schedule. On the other hand, even though the stakeholders have agreed on the approach, but if they haven't really seen specifically what the change will be, I have the risk of user not agreeing on the screen change, etc. Since this system is managed by external vendor, it would be hard to request the change from them because the scope of work has been defined in the contract.

Kindly advise.