If you’re evaluating an agency, chances are you’ll be examining their work. You’ll want to see forward-thinking design, a strong showcase of elegant development solutions, and a comprehensive understanding of your industry. What clients often overlook is one of the biggest predictors of a long-lasting partnership: the people behind their project management.

In a world where AI has become a necessary component of achieving great design at scale, project management may be one of the few disciplines left where inter-personal skills make up a significant portion of craft mastery. The work may be digital, but successful projects remain deeply human.

Communication as a hard skill

No matter how many languages a project manager actually speaks, they are always multilingual. That’s because great project managers possess the ability to translate limitations and setbacks from all disciplines to clients, in instances where shielding them from complexity is the most beneficial.

When possible, they help find creative teams a seat at the table where discussion and trade offs become necessary. Despite not contributing directly to design output, project managers are still collaborators, immersing themselves in understanding the work from a high level that gives them bigger picture insights.

It’s that type of stakeholder management and team engagement that naturally builds trust. They signal to teams, both internal and external, that they seek to understand what’s going on with the goal always being to ensure that projects keep progressing.

More than gantt charts

Getting to know the people involved can be a transformative experience for projects. PM’s are often the glue that holds teams together, whether they mean to or not. They pick up on details that have an impact on culture. Knowing how many timezones a project spans translates to scheduling Slack messages for a designer based overseas. Asking a developer about their recent vacation at an all-hands meeting sparks conversation between new team members. These day-to-day interactions build over time opening up new doors for collaboration, feedback, and engagement that clients feel in the finished product.

Clients are not exempt from connection, either. Exceptional project managers take the time to get to know the people behind the brief. They know how to tailor their communication style to different personalities and see clients as individuals, not industries lumped together seeking the same type of results. 

Partnerships over projects

At Digital Panda, we know it’s not just the first impression, but the lasting impression that turns a successful project into a lifetime partnership. We’re excited to meet every new client who takes the time to inquire about the talent of our team, including project management. If you’ve been looking for an agency who can build living, breathing experiences for human users then, let’s talk.