The Future of Our Profession

In February, NYU invited me to participate in a panel about the future of Project Management. Yesterday, one of my colleagues invited me to join a podcast entitled "Career Insights" where they interview subject matter experts about their careers. It seems there are years between these two opportunities, which encouraged me to think about the future of IT professions, agile coaching, project management, functional management, and leadership overall.

In these three months, we experienced denial, anger, uncertainty, loss, acceptance – the whole Kubler-Ross cycle. In these three months, we revised our values, removed noise from our lives, and embraced a lot of things we lost or forgot about – value of family, the value of space, the value of caring and kindness, the value of every day of human life…

What does it mean for us – in project and product management jobs, which are in the end of the day different instances of people profession – whether we delight customers with our products working backward from their needs, optimize value delivery by motivating software teams as scrum masters, supporting organizational transformation as agile coaches?

As I was trying to find answers to these questions in my own experience, in conversations with my colleagues or dialogs with multiple professionals reaching out to me on LinkedIn – for support, with questions, ideas, proposals, I realized that there are new trends emerging in the career market or becoming much more prominent. I recorded these changes in the form of a SaMoLo (More of, Same of, Less of) retrospective:

This is my personal opinion and may not reflect your own experience or one of any of my employers. The range of professions I am talking about is quite broad – from scrum masters to traditional project managers to functional managers.

The trend in our profession is cthe same for Scrum Masters, Project and Product Managers, or Agile Coaches – moving from deep subject matter expertise to the ability to motivate people, from controlling people to empowering them, from hard skills to soft skills fueled by empathy and integrity.

What does it mean for today’s job market, especially nowadays when the economy is unpredictable and unstable, for our profession that drives the delivery of value with quality and customer-centricity?

There are three trends that I observed:

1.    Demand is higher than ever. While many companies froze hiring, there is a growing demand for our profession, because we have the ability to create order out of chaos, help set expectations, align delivery, and support teams in building products. The need is growing.

2.    Soft skills are as important as professional skills, if not more. When team members are remote, when employees experience hardships and many go through personal challenges, it is important to find the right tone to support them not just in professional delivery, but in balancing their responsibilities and coping with all the challenges.

3.    While empathy is paramount to success, it cannot be used as an excuse to slow down delivery. Ability to understand the bottlenecks and enable teams to deliver customer value with quality and predictability through delegating, collaborating, knowledge sharing, and any possible channels, sometimes in a very creative way. This requires other important skills, such as flexibility (rigidity is among the major reasons for failure in our profession), ability to deal with uncertainty, remain calm under stress, prevent finger pointing and address anger in a compassionate but firm way. These are just some of the qualities that become more and more important.

What’s in it for you?

What does it mean for established professionals, as well as for those who are seeking to become a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, or a Project Manager?

When looking for a job, create a profile that speaks to who you are, what you believe in, and how you work with people. Add your values, motivations, describe professional knowledge sharing – meetups, presentations, articles, books, include community work, challenges you overcame, and lessons you learned. Indicate on your profile whether you are open to new opportunities and how you see your next steps. And finally, prepare for your interview by engaging in storytelling about your real work (or college) experience where you were able to overcome challenges, energize others, and be humble when talking about your achievements.

In sum, be the person you would like to work with. Start with why, describe the how, and be true to what you stand for.