From Depth to Breadth: What it feels like to Project Manage

It feels like Tetris.

You may be considering project management as a career path. You might also be wondering why anybody in their right mind would want to. Either way, let me tell you what it initially feels like to be doing this kind of work.

In some ways, it feels a bit like playing Tetris. In some other ways, it feels a bit like how the One Ring felt to Bilbo Baggins.

In Tetris, random objects rain down from the sky, each one with a different profile. If you don’t assess, prioritize, and deal with each one quickly, they will pile up and kill you.

In the first Lord of the Rings movie, Bilbo speaks about what it’s like being with the One Ring. ”I feel thin”, he says, “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”

That pretty much sums it up.

Both these analogies describe the feeling of going from a position of depth to a position of breadth. You generally start your career at a job requires a deep knowledge on only a few key areas. You do most of the work on those items, become a bit of an expert on them, but don’t see too much outside of your realm of expertise.

When you first move into project management or an equivalent first-level management position, it really does feels like you’re being pulled up and spread thinly across a surface. You are responsible for a lot more, but you do much less or none of the actual work.

One of the challenges of this is that you are often no longer the expert that you were before. You not only need to make sure the work is happening, but you often have to do so with minimal knowledge about that field of work itself.

The time you would normally spend doing the work is spent instead on understanding, communicating and managing other people’s work as it relates to the bigger picture.

I did a lot of thinking before I took my first project management role. In the end, there were two reasons which pushed me to do it. The first, was because it scared me. The second was because I believed it makes you develop skills that make you a more effective human being.

Corny, I know, but I still think it’s true. To be an expert on one thing, you are able to get that one thing done with a high level of excellence. But to have the skills to juggle multiple things, to understand quickly, and to communicate? With the help of others and a bit of coordination you can get lots of things done. Which one seems to have the most utility?

It’s not that getting really good at the one thing isn’t important. It is. Depth gets you credibility. You can create great things on your own. At the very least, it teaches you what it means to get really good at something, and the kind of dedication that it takes. There are days where I miss the juiciness of “real” work.

The thing is, being an expert in a field is only of use when applied to that field itself. Once you‘ve developed the skills to manage breadth, you can really apply them to pretty much anything you encounter in life. Your IT project at work, or a renovation project at home. A gathering of a few friends, or running an event with hundreds of people. Anything.

Managing breadth is the ultimate transferable skill set. I went into project management because it forced me to develop these skills, so that I can apply them in other parts of my life.

But after all this time I’m still terrible at Tetris.