After last week’s post introducing PMI’s Top 50 Most Influential Projects of 2022, I wanted to take a deeper dive into PMI’s writeup on Google’s Real Tone project.
(Before we get into this post, I want to be very clear that I don’t have any affiliation with Google or the Real Tone project; everything I discuss here is just my educated guess based on years of experience leading projects and my knowledge of the market.)
The link above provides much more detail, but basically, Google is working to correct a long-standing bias toward light skin in smartphone images through a project called Real Tone, which develops AI algorithms that more accurately train’s Google’s face recognition software, as well as its camera hardware, to both capture and categorize images of people of color more accurately.
What does a project manager do here?
I want to draw our attention to several points in this writeup. First, the team who made this project happen over the course of the last six years is incredibly interdisciplinary. There are machine learning experts, photography experts, cinematographers, DEI leads, programmers, and engineers moving the needle day-to-day (and that’s just from what I can tell after reading this article for 10 minutes and then googling for an additional 10 minutes or so).
I can guarantee you that the project manager who moved this team’s work forward is familiar with all of these disciplines but is not an expert in all of them.
If I had to guess how to summarize what this project manager’s work leading this project did look like, here’s some of the things I would say:
- It’s very unlikely that a photographer and a software engineer are going to hop onto a Zoom call by themselves and share their respective technical expertise in a way that they both understand and which provides actionable “next steps”. So some of a project manager’s role hereis going to be that of a translator.
- It’s very unlikely in turn that a project manager is going to KNOW how to translate for a photographer and a software engineer and then on top of that a cinematographer and a DEI lead and and and based on the list we made a few paragraphs up. So in order to act as an effective translator, a project manager is probably going to need to do a lot of 1:1 interviewing with stakeholders up front to understand what these folks even do.
- Based on everything I know about how humans work, it’s also very unlikely that team members getting really excited about each others’ work are going to accurately estimate how long it takes to combine the powers of (for example) a photographer and a software engineer. So a project manager’s job is also going to be sitting in meetings and then:
- Reality-checking individual contributors — many of whom who love to say things like “yeah I don’t think that should take that long” or “I don’t think that’s possible” but who have a hard time in the in-between — with some level of diplomacy
- Constantly reminding (before, during, and after these meetings) the team about exactly what is and isn’t in scope
- Following up from a frantic brainstorming meeting with a first-pass at translating a white-board full of ideas into a spreadsheet full of milestones and dates and then (critically) getting the team’s consensus on whether they think that spreadsheet is realistic
- Unless leadership at the top is very bought into DEI initiatives as a core strategic objective, it may be difficult at first to quantify value in a way that satisfies leadership if budgets are tight. A project manager would work closely with their own boss (usually a product/portfolio manager) to quantify this value through stakeholder analysis, business opportunity analysis, and competitor analysis in order to protect the project’s longevity.
What types of people make great project managers?
So the most important takeaway here: notice what type of contributor is going to excel at being able to do all of the above. It isn’t a deep-dive subject matter expert, right? It’s someone who’s going to be able to wear a lot of hats. The ideal project manager here is going to be someone who excels at communicating internally and externally. It’s going to be someone who is comfortable moving forward in ambiguity, but who also remembers to circle back to make sure that ambiguity resolved as the team expected (or to change plans accordingly). It’s going to be someone who is organized and also flexible.
If you are the greatest software engineer in the world, but you don’t have the skills we just described in the paragraph above, you might do a great job on this team but you’re not going to do so as the project manager.
Think about the answers to the following questions through the lens of your time in higher education:
- Have you had to spend a lot of time communicating internally and externally?
- What strategies have you used to communicate effectively even when you were confused?
- How about communicating effectively even when others were confused?
- What are some ways you’ve worked hard to help others understand the value of your work?
- Have you had to use leadership skills to remind others of why we’re doing the work we’re doing (and also, ahem, why we’re not doing the work that’s outside our scope)?
Wherever the answer to a question above is clear… congratulations, that’s one more project management interview question you’re ready to answer effectively. Wherever the answer to a question above is unclear, that’s where it probably makes sense to focus on stretch assignments or getting yourself onto new projects.
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