The human side of project leadership #006

What if you actually like being a project manager?

Featuring Shannan Anderson, Lead Project Manager at Blend Interactive and Digital PM Summit 2026 Volunteer

Most of the conversations I’ve had in this series have been with speakers at this year’s Digital PM Summit. This one is a little different.

Shannan Anderson isn’t speaking in Asheville. She’s a project manager at Blend Interactive, she’s attended several Digital PM Summits, she joined one of my Project Management for Humans book clubs, and this year she’s volunteering at the event.

Shannan and I connect on The Bureau Slack frome time to time and we were chatting recently, she said something that caught my attention: she loves managing projects.

I mean, who says that? Apparently Shannan does. So I wanted to know why.

When project management is actually project management

Like a lot of people, Shannan didn’t exactly set out to become a PM. She started in social work, became an assistant, moved into account management at a marketing firm, and eventually realized that she was pretty good at the organizational side of the work.

She loves a list. She loves tasks. She loves crossing things off. She's one of us.

But there was something else in her story that I think a lot of digital PMs will recognize. In previous roles, “project management” was often a catch-all. She managed the project, but she also did marketing and whatever else needed an owner.

At Blend, she gets to focus on project management. That distinction matters because it allows her to focus on the people involved in the work: what the client needs, how the team works, what concerns are coming up, and what needs to happen to keep things moving. It’s less about producing the deliverable and more about creating the conditions that help everyone else produce it.

Confidence doesn’t mean having every answer

One of my favorite parts of our conversation was Shannan’s take on confidence.

Earlier in her career, difficult client conversations felt intimidating. Over time, she realized that clients don’t necessarily need a PM who agrees with everything they say. Sometimes they want someone who will challenge them, tell them no, or help them understand what is possible.

That confidence also means being able to say, “I don’t know.”

A good PM doesn’t have to walk into every meeting armed with every possible answer. They need to know what they know, be comfortable with what they don’t, and follow through when they say they’ll get an answer.

That sounds simple. It takes experience to actually believe it.

Getting to know the people, not just the project

Shannan also talked about how much she enjoys getting to know the people she works with.

Some clients want to spend the first five minutes of a call talking about their lives. Others want to get straight to business. Some developers have specific ways they like to work or communicate. The more you work with people, the more you start to pick up on all of those little differences.

There isn’t a template for that.

It’s one of the reasons I keep coming back to the human side of this work. You can learn a process. You can adopt a framework. You can configure the hell out of your project management tool.

But eventually you have to understand the people.

Finding your people

That brought us to the Digital PM Summit.

Shannan has attended three of them, and what she gets from the event isn’t just a collection of talks or new techniques. It’s hearing other PMs tell their stories and realizing that other people are dealing with the same things.

Sometimes those conversations give you a new idea. Sometimes they reassure you that what you’re experiencing is normal. And sometimes they make you realize that maybe the problem isn’t you. Maybe you’re working in an environment that makes good project management unnecessarily difficult.

That kind of perspective is exactly why I started the Digital PM Summit in the first place. I wanted to meet people who did the same weird job I did. Years later, that’s still the part I care about most.

Shannan is volunteering in Asheville this year partly because she wants to meet even more of those people. And I love that. The Summit has never just been about the people standing on stage. Some of the most valuable conversations happen over coffee, at lunch, between sessions, or when two PMs start comparing notes and realize they’ve been dealing with almost the exact same problem.

And maybe that’s also where this series goes next. There are a lot more project managers out there with stories worth hearing.

T L ; D R - What makes someone actually love being a project manager? I talked with Shannan Anderson about confidence, client relationships, knowing what you don’t know, and the value of finding other PMs who understand the work. Shannan is also volunteering at this year’s Digital PM Summit in Asheville, where that kind of connection is a big part of what makes the event special.