The Human Side of Project Leadership #003

What If We Designed the Project Experience?

Featuring Maggie Lynn, PMP®‍, Digital PM Summit 2026 Speaker

We spend a lot of time in project management designing the work. We build plans, create processes, schedule meetings, and track risks. But how often do we think about designing the experience of doing the work?

That's the idea at the center of my conversation with Maggie Lynn, Senior Producer at Threespot and a speaker at this year's Digital PM Summit. Maggie's session, "From Plan to Experience: Designing Delivery That Actually Works," looks at project delivery through the lens of experience design, storytelling, and something I admittedly know very little about: gaming.

Maggie and I have worked together before in a coaching capacity, and that was when I first learned about the connection she sees between project management and game design. I found it fascinating then, and I still do.

Maggie has been playing Dungeons & Dragons since she was seven, and she describes projects as being "game-shaped." There are roles, constraints, objectives, decisions, and some definition of winning. You might know where you're trying to end up, but what happens along the way depends on the choices people make.

That's not a bad description of most projects I've worked on.

One of my favorite moments in our conversation came when Maggie talked about a client asking her to guarantee a risk-free launch. Obviously, that's impossible. Instead, she told them she could make the ambiguity clear enough for them to make good decisions.

I think that's a pretty good description of our job as project leaders. We're not here to eliminate uncertainty. We're here to help people navigate it.

Maggie also made a point that really stuck with me: sometimes what looks like a process problem is actually a story problem.

When something isn't working, our instinct is often to add process or add another meeting, template, approval, spreadsheet, or whatever "tool" fits the bill. But the actual problem might be that people don't understand where they are, why a decision matters, or what needs to happen next. That's where the idea of designing the project experience becomes useful.

Every meeting, update, kickoff, and presentation gives us an opportunity to create clarity and build trust. Maggie suggests starting with something as simple as your next meeting: decide where it needs to end, think about what everyone in the room needs from it, and design backward from there.

It's a small shift, but it also reinforces something I believe strongly about project management: PMs are creative. We design conversations, systems, relationships, and environments that help people get good work done. And as AI takes on more of the administrative work around projects, that kind of creative leadership and human judgment becomes even more important.

If you'd like to hear the full conversation, watch it above. And if you'll be joining us in Asheville this October, don't miss Maggie's session, "From Plan to Experience: Designing Delivery That Actually Works."

Also, somewhere along the way, Maggie convinced me that we need a gaming session at the Summit. So apparently that's happening too.

T L ; D R - Every project creates an experience, whether we intentionally design it or not. Maggie Lynn looks at what project managers can learn from game design and storytelling to create greater clarity, build trust, and make better decisions throughout the work.