PMI defines project management as "the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver something of value to people" — and the keyword there is deliver. A project is temporary (it ends), unique (it produces something that didn't exist before), and constrained (you have less time, money, and people than you'd like). A project manager is the person who keeps the delivery on track when reality starts pressing on those constraints.
What a PM actually does
Most of the work isn't glamorous. It's the unsexy connective tissue that lets a team of specialists ship something complicated without colliding into each other.
- Plan — break the work down, sequence it, estimate it, and write it down somewhere people will look.
- Coordinate — keep dependencies surfaced, hand-offs clean, and meetings short.
- De-risk — name what could go wrong before it does, and pre-decide who acts when it does.
- Communicate — translate up to sponsors, sideways to peers, and down to the team. Three different audiences, three different vocabularies.
- Decide — when scope, time, and cost can't all be honored, the PM owns the trade-off conversation.
↳ in the wild
PM vs. doing the work
One of the hardest mindset shifts for new PMs is letting go of personal output. If you came from engineering, design, or analysis, your value used to be the artifact you produced. As a PM, your value is the decisions, alignment, and momentum the team gains because you exist. On a good week, the team ships and you barely touched the keyboard. That's the job working.
↳ where this fits in Charter