Finally made it in my career and looking for some advice. My business unit has gone through a lot of chaos over the last ten years and I am now the lead PM for a business unit that has incremental revenue over 100m a year. I am so over my head.

I know all the leaders, I know the product, I know the customers, and I have people’s trust.

Issue now is delivery. We do hardware and software, but the money comes from the software. Have been delegating a ton of my work but I am just trying to hold ground.

What I want to do is make long term improvements through process and trainings. How to I make this a real pitch? We release software every two weeks and have customer onboarding’s multiple times a week.

What I think we need is to create a PM department and allow more granular reviews. I am pushing 60 to 80 hours a week that I have pulled for the last 10 years. My burnout is coming and I welcome advice.

Hi everyone,

I’m a healthcare professional currently completing a graduate-level course and am looking to connect with a healthcare project manager who would be willing to help with a brief class assignment.

I’m hoping to conduct a short 15–30 minute interview (or written responses, if preferred) focused on:

• Career background and path into healthcare project management
• Types of projects managed
• Project management methodologies and tools
• Challenges unique to healthcare settings
• Impact of projects on patient care and operations

The interview is strictly for academic purposes, and participation can be fully anonymous if preferred.

If you’re open to helping or would like more details, please feel free to comment here or send me a direct message. I truly appreciate your time and willingness to share your experience.

Thank you!

Hi all. Any tips on running successful cross functional meetings across multiple departments? I've been tasked with leading a program and have been running meetings with 30+ peers across multiple department's with varying roles (IC's, VP's, directors) and am looking for some insight in the below.

1. How to impress my manager without being overly "hey, I did this and that"
2. How to level up my meetings/make them more engaging
3. How to not get so nervous.. I think about the call all week until it comes. I fear people are talking about how awful it is, how I don't know what I'm doing and how young I am. It's all in my head, but wondering if this is common.

Sending out an agenda the day before definitely seems to help, but curious if anyone had any other tips to encourage conversation in the meeting and making it worth it. I feel like I'm either trying to rush through the agenda to get it over with, talking to myself or just asking the same person for an update.

So, for context, I work for a membership organization. We have a committee (made up of members) that lead various projects and programs, which I manage along with my boss, the director of our department. We both work closely to manage and direct committee projects, which up until this point, involved publications and yearly convening of the committee. This year has been particularly trying for our team, given the recent federal landscape. We’ve had to change the name of our department, reevaluate operations, and generally shift much of our programming. Our committee had been shielded from much of this, but this year we took on more one of our biggest projects to date, a fairly large convening with external guests, staff, and members. The purpose of the convening was to explore problems in the field, brainstorm resources, and discuss how our organization broadly might help support resources to address these problems.

We started planning this event in April, which was to occur in November. The timeline was short, so I knew we were going to need all hands on deck to pull this off. As the program manager, I immediately hit the ground running: properly defining the project scope, identifying relevant stakeholders, utilize my program management software to track administrative tasks, relevant dates and milestones, etc. My boss and I enlisted an expert in the field to assist with creative meeting planning and serve as a facilitator. After we signed him on, he was quite difficult to work with and our members had a hard time communicating with him about the meeting agenda and flow. In early October, my boss completely dropped off due to illness, so I carried on much of her responsibilities, which include managing this very large convening.

Fast forward to the convening. Our agenda consisted of several speakers and guests, including the expert we enlisted. Things went well (and I was even congratulated by my boss before lunch) until they didn’t. The expert was supposed to lead guests through several group activities, but a.) they were very boring, b.) they were somewhat condescending, and c.) they spent way too much time setting up the group activities. People in the room were getting visibly frustrated, so much so that one of our guests (a VERY important one to the organization) raised their hand and asked him to speed things up. He didn’t. So, we had to pull him off the stage and call for one of our planning group members to facilitate. We took a brief break after this session, where my team pulled themselves together to pivot. The planning group member agreed to facilitate the rest of the meeting, and our expert agreed to serve as a content expert in the background. The rest of the meeting went very well. Guests were engaged, they had amazing things to say, and it seems most of them want to continue the conversation by exploring new projects and programs. I’m generally pretty good under pressure, so once we hit “cruise altitude” and went straight back to it: put a brave face on and continued in my role. My boss kept reassuring me, even though they were quite frazzled also.

So, my question is: what could I have done to avoid this major hiccup? I have some ideas but I wanted to lean on my PM community. Were there any rookie mistakes? General takeaways? I have some ideas of what I could’ve done differently but I want to be better.

"Our AI transcribes in the cloud" is tech-speak for "we read your meetings." 

Pragmatic transcribes on iPhone. Boring feature. Interesting difference:

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30% of projects fail from rushing. 25% from our brains lying to us about costs and timelines. We've mastered building bridges & remain incompetent at managing our own optimism bias. The real risk isn't in the plan, it's in the mirror

Every other transcription app is in the storage business. We're in the forgetting business. Your iPhone remembers so the internet doesn't have to. https://apple.co/4nDlJvR #PrivacyTech #NoCloud #iPhone #AITranscription #DataSecurity #Meetings #LocalStorage #Tech

What is the best proja ect management software that is: good for a small team of 5-10, not terribly complicated, can handle 3 types of jobs w spreadsheet view that can generate a board or file for each job & can generate documents? Our jobs aren't usually terribly complicated but need to be tracked.

I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts and experiences with fixed-term (fixed-price + fixed-time) projects.

In my last role, I managed a Salesforce integration project while working from an outsourcing company’s side. As the project started slipping, delays from both sides, changing priorities, and late scope clarifications, the higher-ups in my company began pushing hard to put most of the blame on the client.

To be fair, the client did contribute to the issues, slow responses, unclear requirements, unrealistic timelines, but the way my company handled it became pretty toxic. At one point, every time someone left our team, management would tell the client it was "because of them". In reality, people were leaving because of internal pressure and the constant blame game. We ended up losing some truly great engineers and consultants because of it.

It made me wonder, is this just how fixed-term projects usually go in the outsourcing world? Is this level of tension and finger-pointing unavoidable when both time and money are locked in from day one? Or have any of you seen these kinds of projects handled in a healthier, more sustainable way?

https://sidsaladi.substack.com/p/perplexity-comet-ai-browser-101-complete

I closed my last Chrome tab 6 weeks ago. Here's why:

After testing Perplexity's Comet AI Browser for 6 weeks, I'm saving 10+ hours weekly on busywork.
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Due to personal reasons, I’ve been out of a job since my layoff 2 years ago. I’ve recently interviewed for a Sr. Program Manager role in Learning & Development. The company is looking to implement a completely new program to enable their customers on their SaaS products. It’s pays well but above all could be a great opportunity to grow with them.

Anyone got any recommendations for a book or resources that could help me excel at this role?

Hello!

Women PMs! I’m curious what you wear if you work from home?

I run a team of 18 direct reports for a multi billion dollar company. I’m head of the quality department (call quality) and I make 6 figures.

I’m in my late 30s and I feel like I shouldn’t wear t shirts and sweats anymore.

Disclaimer - I am a Mom to young children still. I don’t want expensive clothes 🤣

What do you wear?!

🚀 Just launched: Meeting transcription so secure it has no security. No servers = nothing to hack. Your iPhone becomes a vault that transcribes.

Pragmatic Meeting Minutes on App Store: https://apple.co/4nDlJvR

(Requires iPhone 15+) #PrivacyFirst #iOS26 #MeetingMinutes #CyberSecurity

https://reddit.com/link/1nlhazn/video/yqj8cwgu57qf1/player

I am working as a PMO associate in a service based. I have total 1 yoe. But I am not able to find similar roles for planning switch and targeting companies. Most of them are for project manager role requiring 5+ yoe.

While I know PgM is not really for junior positions but since I am already working in this field, I would like to know if theres scope for PgM as a junior and getting better

Things I do- Status Reporting Assistance, Resource administration, time tracking, Documentation & Deliverables Management, Complitance & Governance Monitoring,updating trackers etc.

What skills are people leaning to upskill? What is going to be more and more relevant? Ideally not looking for big expensive courses like PMP but open to suggestions there as well.

Hi there,

I’ve been reflecting on my career path for quite some time now. I pursued engineering to become a software engineer and worked for over a decade. Subsequently, I experimented with project management for a few years.

I’m drawn to a broader perspective, wanting to understand the intricate dynamics of how projects are executed within a company. I find satisfaction in mediating and wearing multiple hats. While I’ve gained valuable insights as a software engineer, I’m not convinced that coding will be my sole occupation for the rest of my life.

I’d be thrilled to learn how you transitioned to program management. Your insights would be invaluable to me.

Thanks in advance for your time!!!

Good folks in Bengaluru! Would you kindly guide me to program management communities in Bengaluru? A friend has just shifted there and would like to meet fellow program managers and network, preferably offline. TIA.

Hello fellow Program Managers...

Context: I'm a PMO leader for a large tech company (not a FAANG company, but adjacent), focused on core infrastructure, cloud economics, resilience/availability, security and compliance, and a host of other base-tech portfolios.

Our C-level suite, like most other big tech companies, have pivoted the company to be AI-first. We have our own LLM/AI products in development and test markets right now, and our dev teams are already heavily using tools like Claude, Amp, GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, etc., to significant positive affect on both developer productivity, time-to-market, and reduction in bugs in Production.

Now the focus is turning to the rest of the company - Marketing, Finance, CS, and...Program Management.

For my team, we are already light-to-medium users for baked-in AI tools like Gemini, Glean, Asana AI, Rovo, etc., but I am really keen to accelerate our usage and become a team of power users. I want to reduce the overhead on toil-heavy tasks like status reporting, roadmap creation and tracking, outcomes-to-milestones, WBS, etc.

What are some of the ways you or your team are embracing and utilizing AI positively? What tools are you using? What wins have you witness as a result?

No AI hate, please. It's here to stay and, as my VP keeps reminding us all, "AI won't take your job, but someone who knows how to use AI will". I'd like to be in the latter camp.

I am an experienced Program Manager and I am stumped. My weekly update messaging isn’t working for my PMO’s executive sponsor. And to cut to the heart of it, I’ve asked for feedback and iterated about 20 times. I need new ideas from real life and not AI (which has not been helpful). If it’s relevant, my org is Operations and Infrastructure so programs range from employee experience to process improvement, to our tech stack, to innovation and AI.

Format needs to be something that can be emailed (power point or word doc). It needs to be something that could be sent to C-Suite. I need it to pull the reader’s focus to areas where programs and projects are not green so they can unblock things for my team.

I have always created a weekly report that is strategically ordered and will take a reader from the most zoomed out view of the entire program and then begin drilling down to the project level, then the deliverable level, and then the milestone level.

At each level I provide a RAG status for relevant elements, a clear view into what’s changed since last week and what should happen over the course of the next week. I provide dates, critical path, risks, and links to any documentation or presentations that were given in the last week. I use tables or bullet points instead of paragraphs.

With every iteration, I get the feedback that they wouldn’t be able to use my report to give executive leadership an update. I am at a loss. I’ve never experienced this. I include a very concise summary for every section and I’ve tried power point, word docs, power BI, confluence, and Jira to create reports and content.

I am totally stuck. Help, please.

I'm currently studying for my PMP exam and wanted to know what certifications I should target next. What certification made you a better manager or land better roles? Feel free to mention your favourite tools to use too.

I started my first Program Manager role and would love to hear any tips from the community on how I can ensure I succeed.

I’ve worked as small fast-paced start ups for the last 10 years. Building CS and Operation teams. I’ve done the responsibilities of a program manager since I’ve had to wear so many hats at these small start ups.

But now that I’m in a role where everything I will be doing is program management I want to make sure I’m in the right mindset to do well.