#MassBlackout
#November25th
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@PyConUK @baconandcoconut
Project? #NoProjects

Do Project Managers Realise They’re Obsolete?

Do Project Managers Realise They’re Obsolete?

The Tech Industry’s Quiet Revolution Against Traditional PM Roles

The tech industry has been running a quiet experiment for the past decade, and the results are brutal for traditional project managers. Whilst PMPs keep updating their LinkedIn profiles with shiny new certifications, most successful tech companies have quietly ditched project management roles. They’re using self-organising teams and product-focused approaches instead.

The harsh truth? Many project managers in tech are desperately hanging onto jobs that the industry has already moved past.

What’s Wrong with Projects Anyway?

Before we talk about why project coordinators are becoming irrelevant, let’s be honest about why the whole project approach is broken in tech. (See also: #NoProjects)

Projects create fake deadlines for work that never really ends. Your app doesn’t magically stop needing updates when the ‘project’ finishes. But projects pretend everything has a neat beginning, middle, and end. This is ridiculous in tech where products need more or less constant updates.

Projects also focus on the wrong stuff. Instead of asking ‘did we solve the customer’s problem?’ they ask ‘did we hit our deadline and stay on budget?’ Teams end up caring more about finishing the project than building something people actually need.

And here’s the kicker—projects waste tons of time on planning and meetings. How many hours do tech teams spend in status meetings, writing reports, and sitting through steering committee presentations? All that time could be spent actually building stuff.

The biggest problem? Projects break up teams just when they’re getting good at working together. You spend months learning how the code works, understanding the business, and figuring out how to collaborate. Then the project ends and everyone gets shuffled to different teams. It’s insane.

The #NoProjects Revolution

The #NoProjects movement, started by folks like P G Rule and FlowChainSensei, isn’t just complaining about projects. They’ve got a better way.

Instead of temporary projects, successful tech companies now use persistent product teams. These teams stick together and own their product long-term. No more ‘hand it off to maintenance’ nonsense. If you build it, you keep updating it.

This isn’t just theory. Companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon prove it works. They organise around products, not projects. Their teams stay together, learn deeply about their domain, and can move fast because they’re not constantly starting over.

The #NoProjects crowd figured out that the problem wasn’t bad project coordination—it was the whole idea of projects in the first place. When you stop trying to force continuous work into temporary boxes, everything gets easier.

Self-Organising Teams: The Coordinator Killer

Self-organising teams in tech have basically made traditional project managers irrelevant. These teams have developers, designers, product people, and QA folks who collectively own their work. They don’t need someone else to coordinate for them.

Here’s what’s wild—these teams often move faster than teams with dedicated project managers. When six smart people can figure out their own priorities, plan their own work, and make their own decisions, why add another layer of oversight?

The best part? These teams actually understand the technical work they’re doing. They can make smart tradeoffs between features and technical debt. They know when to cut scope and when to push back on unrealistic deadlines. Traditional project managers usually don’t have that technical depth.

Product People Ate Their Lunch

Whilst project managers were busy updating their Gantt charts, product specialists swooped in and took over the strategic parts of their job. Product people combine market knowledge, technical understanding, and execution skills in ways project managers never did.

Product specialists own outcomes, not just timelines. They decide what to build, understand why it matters, and can make calls about technical tradeoffs. They’re not just coordinating other people’s work—they’re directly contributing to the product’s success.

Many companies discovered that a strong product specialist working with a self-organising engineering team gets better results than the old project manager + team structure. Product people bring strategic thinking that traditional PMs usually lacked. Better yet, have the self-organising engineering team also be or become the product domain specialists.

Agile Killed the Project Manager Star

Agile development pretty much destroyed the traditional project management playbook. Agile is all about working software over documentation, people over processes, and responding to change over following plans. That’s the exact opposite of traditional project management.

Most companies that have adopted Agile have tried to rebrand their project managers as Scrum Masters at first. But that mostly fails because good Scrum Masters need to understand the technical work, whilst traditional project managers usually don’t have that background.

The DevOps Bump

DevOps eliminated a lot of the handoff problems that project managers used to handle. When development teams own their own deployment, monitoring, and production support, there’s way less coordination needed.

Modern tech teams do continuous integration, infrastructure as code, and automated testing. Code flows from development to production with minimal human coordination. When this stuff is automated, what exactly is the project manager coordinating?

The ‘you build it, you run it’ philosophy means teams are responsible for their stuff end-to-end. This eliminates the need for someone to handle handoffs between development and operations teams.

Startups Don’t Use Project Managers

The most telling evidence comes from startups. Most successful tech startups operate without any dedicated project managers. They use self-organising teams, clear product vision, and direct communication.

Startups that try to add traditional project management usually find it slows them down. All the planning meetings and status reporting kill their ability to move fast and adapt quickly.

When startups do eventually need more coordination, they hire product specialists, engineering leads, or technical programme leads—roles that combine coordination with domain expertise and direct value creation.

Enterprise Companies Are Catching On

Even big, slow enterprise companies are starting to figure this out. Their most innovative teams usually operate with minimal traditional project management oversight. Internal studies keep showing that self-organising teams with clear product ownership deliver better results faster.

The enterprises still clinging to traditional project management are finding themselves at a competitive disadvantage. They’re slower to market and less able to adapt than competitors who’ve embraced product-focused, team-based approaches.

The Desperate Rebranding Campaign

Seeing the writing on the wall, lots of project  managers are frantically trying to rebrand themselves. They’re getting Scrum Master certifications, learning basic coding, or calling themselves ‘technical programme managers’ or ‘delivery leads.’

This rebranding reveals the profession’s fundamental problem. If traditional project management skills were still valuable, there wouldn’t be any need to constantly learn new skills and change job titles.

The most honest take? These aren’t career progressions—they’re career pivots. Project managers who successfully move into product roles, engineering leadership, or technical roles have basically admitted that traditional project management wasn’t enough.

The Bigger Picture: All Traditional Oversight Is Under Threat

But here’s the thing—project managers aren’t the only ones feeling the heat. The whole traditional hierarchy of ‘oversight’ and ‘supervision’ is crumbling in modern organisations, especially in tech.

Think about it: when teams are self-organising, when knowledge workers can make their own decisions, when tools automate most management tasks, what exactly do traditional supervisors do all day? The same forces killing project management are questioning the need for layers of oversight, period.

Netflix famously operates with minimal traditional hierarchy. Their teams make decisions, own outcomes, and course-correct without multiple layers of approval. Amazon’s two-pizza teams work similarly—small, autonomous groups that don’t need constant supervision to function effectively.

The pattern is clear: high-performing organisations are flattening their structures and empowering teams to operate independently. A few traditional command-and-control hierarchies are being replaced by networks of autonomous teams with clear missions and accountability for results.

Even the concept of ‘people oversight’ is evolving. Instead of supervisors who assign work and monitor progress, successful companies are moving towards coaching, mentoring, and servant leadership models. The focus shifts from controlling people to enabling them.

This isn’t just happening in tech startups. Even massive organisations like Spotify, Haier, and Morning Star have demonstrated that you can scale to thousands of employees without traditional hierarchical structures. When people are trusted to do their jobs and held accountable for outcomes, most traditional oversight becomes unnecessary toxic overhead.

The uncomfortable truth for anyone in a traditional oversight role: if your primary function is coordinating other people’s work, monitoring their progress, or making decisions they could make themselves, your role is probably next on the chopping block.

The Evidence Is Overwhelming

The #NoProjects movement isn’t just talk—it’s backed by real results. Companies that ditched traditional project structures report faster delivery, happier teams, better products, and lower costs.

These companies organise around persistent teams rather than temporary projects. They fund product areas instead of specific initiatives. They measure customer outcomes instead of just project completion metrics.

The success of these approaches proves that the problem wasn’t insufficient project management—it was the overhead and artificial constraints that project management created.

What This Means for Project Managers

The evidence from the tech industry is crystal clear: traditional project management has become largely obsolete in modern technology companies. Self-organising teams, product-focused structures, DevOps practices, and the #NoProjects movement have eliminated most of the management work that once justified project coordinator roles.

For project managers currently working in tech, the choice is simple: evolve or become irrelevant. You might choose to transition into a role that creates direct value through technical skills, product expertise, or strategic thinking.

The project managers who acknowledge this reality and successfully move into product roles, technical positions, or engineering leadership will survive. Those who keep insisting that traditional project management is still relevant will likely find themselves out of work as the industry continues moving forward without them.

The tech industry’s revolution against traditional project management is basically complete. The only question is whether individual project managers will adapt in time, or whether they’ll keep clinging to an obsolete profession whilst the industry moves on.

#NoProjects

Yes, it's 2025 and companies are still using projects. #NoProjects

#NoProjects is a no-brainer. So why still so many project management open positions? Does management indeed have no brain?

Given #NoProjects, why are there so many project managerment jobs about? #bullshitjobs

@scummvm @felsqualle And concerrnig #NoProjects?

#FromTheArchive

Unlock the secrets of #noprojects and witness the evolution of work culture!

This #InfoQ book sheds light on the challenges & triumphs of adopting this new way of thinking & working.

#FreeDownload 👉 https://bit.ly/3xPHUKJ

Authors: Shane Hastie & Evan Leybourn

@BillieCodes @realn2s@bookwyrm.social
Replying here (still struggling with the #Boowyrm ui)

#NoProjects (AFAIK) has it origin on the bird site in the context of agile software development. It started a heated discussion between people proposing more and better planning opposed to people seeing much of the planning as waste and target going for continuous development.

From the #Cybersecurity perspective one problem with projects is, that they have an defined end and then usually the team gets dissolved. Leaving no one who can implement (security) fixes on the future. Fixes would require another follow up project ☹️

One occasion were this went wrong very publicly is the Equifax breach
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

You can find a collection of articles and post about #NoProjects at https://noprojects.org/

@realn2s Do you have any recommendations relating to #NoProjects? Your post introduced me to the term and it sounds interesting!

"Security is not a "climb to the top of the mountain" activity, where once you've reached the peak, you're done! No, security is a "steer the ship through the rocks to keep the boat from rubbing around*activity. There is almost never a "set it and forget it"task or technology in security."

— Revinventing Cybersecurity, p. 189

So true. #Cybersecurity and project based thinking don't work well together. It's related to #NoProjects

#ReinventingCybersecurity

I had a realisation reading How To Take Smart Notes https://bookwyrm.social/book/91734/s/how-to-take-smart-notes regarding #NoEstimates and #NoProjects
Sönke Ahrens distinguishes between planning and structure.
It's not possible to plan a lot of things, but you can structure the work

RT @flowchainsensei@twitter.com

#NoProjects https://twitter.com/annashipman/status/1277563031287971841

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/flowchainsensei/status/1277638888442527744

Going to start the #NoProjects tag here.

Just watched Allan Kelly's No Projects goto; conference video: https://youtu.be/Rzglax8LdaM. It reminded me of how so much of the frustration at my job comes from having a project-oriented company culture. His key points:

* Keep the teams together
* Bring the work to the teams
* Unchanging software is dead software, so you're never "done" with it

I highly recommend watching the video.

@Moke but every time we think we're free of the "Project demon" a new monster rises up and demands estimates, deadlines and planning.

Things seem to fall apart then. So, baby steps. #NoEstimates #Noprojects #LeanEstimates