I technically became a project manager because someone saw it in me before I saw it in myself. But the truth is, I had been doing project management for years.
I started in editorial, juggling deadlines, writers, revisions, and impossible expectations. Then I moved into agency account management, where I was translating client requests into something the team could actually execute. I was already managing scope, negotiating tradeoffs, smoothing over tension, and quietly protecting the work from chaos. No one called it project management yet. But that’s what it was.
When I was recruited in a project manager role, I felt behind. I assumed that “real” project managers had some secret training I’d missed. That they understood things structurally in a way I didn’t. That they felt confident in rooms where I was still calculating my next sentence.
Looking back, there are a few things I wish someone had told me then. I figured I would share them with my PM Squad homies:
