The B2B MC Show
Welcome to the B2B MC Show, where mastery meets curiosity in the business-to-business world! Join us each week as we dive deep into the insights and stories of top industry professionals from various fields. Whether you're an entrepreneur, executive, or enthusiast, our mission is to uncover the secrets to success in the B2B arena. Through engaging interviews with multiple experts per episode, the B2B MC Show is your ultimate guide to becoming the best in your field. Tune in to discover strategies, tips, and inspiration that will help you excel in your professional journey.
The B2B MC Show
How to become a Top Project Manager (Real Stories)
In this enlightening episode of the B2B MC Show, we dive into the world of top-tier project management with the help of two industry giants: Perry Wirth from Accenture and Gerry Hudak, who has extensive experience with notable companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Ispace. Both guests bring a wealth of knowledge and share their personal journeys to becoming leaders in their field.
Perry starts off by explaining the key attributes that a project manager must possess to thrive in a competitive environment. He emphasizes the importance of adaptability and strategic foresight, detailing how these qualities have shaped his approach at Accenture.
Meanwhile, Gerry offers a unique perspective from his time in the aerospace sector, discussing the challenges of managing projects that push the boundaries of innovation and human ambition. His stories from SpaceX and Blue Origin highlight the critical role of resilience and team dynamics in achieving groundbreaking results - including sending people into space!
This episode allows me to go deep and share with you a framework I learned from them both to become an top-tier project manager!
What's up everyone. Chris Cunningham, the B2BMC. My goal of this podcast is to make you better in business, and today I'm focusing on project managers. It's such an important role but no one can really go to school for it. No one knows how to learn it. So I'm giving you a masterclass today by choosing two of the top project managers in the game and asking them all the questions, easy and hard. First off, I'm starting up with Perry Wirth, project manager from Accenture, with over 20 years experience has been absolutely crushing it. And then, second off, I have Jerry Hudak, who's a project manager at SpaceX, blue Origin and more sending rockets to space with project management.
Speaker 1:In this episode, I get down to the nitty gritty and I ask them both amazing questions to help build a framework for you that at the end of the episode, you can take and become a top project manager as well. And the first part of that framework, which they say is more important than everything else, is proactive communication. Perry, take it away. I wanted to know how do you become a top project manager Like an unreal one. And to do this I didn't want to talk to just anyone, I wanted to talk to the best. So I went and I got two of the top project managers in the game and they told me five things that make all the difference in being a top project manager, plus the biggest mistakes they've seen and made themselves. They share real stories. The very first lesson I learned from them is not what you think, and apparently it's more important than knowing agile and scrum framework to being a great project manager, and that is to communicate proactively and effectively while also keeping your word.
Speaker 3:Proactive communication all of the time, but like crystal clear communication. Like, take out all the soft words, like hey, we might hit the budget, like it might be done on time. You know I should be able to pull that off. Like, especially when you're project leadership, keep your eye out for yourself and for your team, using softening words, communication with candor, right, and, like you said, it's direct communication. It's not rude or arrogant or my way or the highway, but it's just full transparency. There's systems, there's frameworks that you just execute.
Speaker 3:But a lot of the things that I have learned and how important they are have just been through project experience. One of them is just standing by your word as a project manager and you know, as that team, like if you say you're going to do it, it better be done and if it's not going to be done, that's, that's cool. But you know, communicate that ahead of time, not after the time, right? So like these little, these little lessons learned, I think, end up being, you know, the most critical things to being successful, even more than you know understanding how, like scrum operates or how to run like an agile meeting. Make sure you're setting boundaries at the beginning of the project, whether those be like communication boundaries or even technical boundaries. Technical boundaries, you might also think of it like just set expectations. Having super clear expectations around what the build is, what the project is, what the scope is, what the outcome that they want to achieve is, is super important.
Speaker 1:I love what Perry said about setting clear boundaries but also being clear on the scope. You really need to understand how far you can go and what needs to be done to be effective in a project. Speaking of communication, I want to know about the real communication, not just the easy stuff. What do you do when someone is not getting their work done or something is just not working out? Tell me about the hard things. How do you address those conversations?
Speaker 3:Man, it really depends on you know what their role is and whatnot. But the first thing I always do is internal self-reflection I love the concept of extreme ownership from Jocko Willink and really taking a situation and seeing how did I influence it right? Is that person failing because I didn't set expectations correctly with them? Maybe I didn't train them correctly? Maybe I didn't monitor them enough? So I'd really like to reflect first on what could I have done better. We know what needs to shift and sometimes they're just not the right person, right, it's not that they're bad, but maybe they're just not the right person for the role. And I've had a lot of projects where I've brought someone in, you know, thinking that they're going to be great in the role, but they're just not the fit for that role. They're not a bad person, right. I just put them in a spot where their skill set doesn't excel.
Speaker 2:Understanding the constraints of the problem. So why?
Speaker 2:is it failing and making sure that they understand why it's failing, I think is also key, right, If they're like hammering the wrong aspect of it. So making sure that kind of they understand what the constraints are and where the effort needs directed to and then kind of seeing, like what, what resources are needed for it. Like maybe it is too much project for that person and maybe it was like misassigned in terms of allocation or they're overwhelmed, Right. So if it's a priority for, like the bigger program, then maybe it's like a bandwidth kind of readjustment, right. So you know, taking stuff off their plate to let them focus on it or, if they're not the right person for it, taking them off of it and giving it to. You know, giving to someone else and maybe like trading projects I've seen that happen successfully a few times.
Speaker 1:Now we're getting to the juicy stuff, but I love both answers. Harry's obviously a great guy and really wants to take the time to see what he could have done better first. That's an awesome project manager, and Jerry really wants to get down to the roots of the problem. What are the constraints? What's holding this back? Now we're off to a good start, but I want to dig deeper. I really want to know the difference between a good project manager and a great project manager. So I asked what is the difference? What's that big thing? And Jerry gave me an unreal answer that blew my mind. He said that he learned this from Elon Musk and the entire culture they built, and that is understanding and challenging assumptions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of the things is challenge your assumptions is important. So things that you thought were true might not be true, like a requirement that someone passed on to you. Right, that you're like oh, what has to be this way? Are you sure it has to be that way? Like, have you asked anyone if it has to be that way? Maybe it was someone from five years ago that they put that in there and now you don't. You know it's not relevant anymore, but you're, like now constrained by this really hard requirement that doesn't even mean anything.
Speaker 2:So make sure you understand your assumptions going into it and, like, keep pushing back on challenging things that you thought were like fundamental truths that are not there.
Speaker 2:Same with, like, if a vendor tells you like this is the date or this is the thing, you can always say like why, or like you know, you can always push back on it. So, things that growing up, right, like you're in school and everything that you are told there is concrete, right, the problem that you're solving, it says these are the, these are the facts of it, right, in reality, that's not not as true, right, those are made by somebody and those can be fallible. So, mainly pushing back on your requirements and kind of constraints, and you'll find a lot of times that it softens up and maybe that's like what you solve. It is that, like the problem that you were trying to solve isn't a problem anymore and people were like, well, that's crazy why you'd have to land on like a lake. And then the question came back like, okay, so why can't we land in a lake? Like, prove to me that we cannot land in a lake. And it was like it's a good point, let's go look at all the lakes and see why is there a?
Speaker 1:lake we can land in. Can you imagine being in that meeting with Elon where he's like why can't we land in a lake? Apparently they had all the facts and they were still right, but he still made them investigate, which is good. Jared, let's dive deeper. You said Elon really taught this to SpaceX and it was the culture. Explain a little more of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, overall, I mean news to culture, explain a little more of that. Yeah, overall, like I mean, he shaped a lot of the way like kind of the company is thinking like him and this like core group of like gwen, shotwell, marching coast, all those guys early on like those group. That group was just like this mindset and it kind of grew, grew this like boot camp of of people. So it's kind of this like way to get things done. That I think has really shaped how I go about things.
Speaker 1:So yeah, he's definitely very intense.
Speaker 2:I would not recommend typically being in technical meetings with him as a person, socially at events. You know he's kind of a chill guy. He talks about video games and you know he's just like a nerdy dude that's hanging out. But for work stuff he's very demanding right. There's no like compromise on things and he's going to challenge you and be like why can't we do this? So why?
Speaker 1:We're like oh, we can do this, but not this. And he goes no, why can't we do?
Speaker 2:both of them. Show me with math and physics and first principles. You said it's impossible. Prove to me that it's impossible, or like let's see it so.
Speaker 1:All right. So if you want to build rockets, you want to build billion dollar companies? We just need to question everything. I guess that's a secret. The next lesson just completely called me off. Going In your career early on, you're told to focus on one thing and get really good at it. But as I dove deeper and asked questions to both of these two, I found a common similarity they tried so many different things early on in their career. So many different things. They wore different hats, learned every part and did different jobs, and that made them much better project managers. So what I really took away from this is both of these two, who are highly successful and amazing companies, just followed their passion. They really just tried to learn things rather than just focusing on one project or one thing, and now they're much more adaptable. They can do so many different things and they truly understand what everyone else is working on because they've done it.
Speaker 3:I've thought a lot about this one and it could be positive or negative, I don't know, because I never did anything about it. But I've worked for Accenture since 2011. It's now. If you're listening to this, it's 2024. I've worked for Accenture since 2011. It's now. If you're listening to this, it's 2024.
Speaker 3:So I've been at the same company for a super long time and I always wonder is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's like maybe I've missed out on opportunities because I'm complacent staying with the same spot, but I also think that I've got a lot of experience and a lot of investment into the company I've been working with at the same point in time as well. You know working with other. I work with a lot of like marketing agencies and it's very common in that industry to like just jump to different companies for raises. Right, you'll be a PM at one company and you want a promotion. Instead of just waiting around in that company to get it, you just hop to a different one. So I've literally worked at a client with a PM that has worked for the same client but with different companies. It's been wild seeing that. So I was wondering am I missing something by not doing that?
Speaker 2:The choice that's had the biggest impact, either positive or negative. I would say the biggest choice maybe just saying being open to things, saying yes and kind of looking for opportunities and maybe, like I mentioned, I kind of have a wide variety of you know, I've kind of been spread out along the kind of development lifecycle and some people kind of narrow in and would say, well, no, that's not for me, cause I'm kind of in here. I think I like the idea of of being, of having more, more breadth there, of like kind of pursuing passions, even if it's not kind of you get told early on in your career that you know well, you need to, kind of narrow in on something, get a confused, and recruiters definitely have been confused looking at my resume because they're like, well, we can't tell if you're a design engineer or an manufacturing engineer or whatnot.
Speaker 2:But I think choosing the things that I think are interesting to me and that are just the most fulfilling to work on, and what I want to work on next and getting experience where I want to get it, I think has been the most impactful, even if at times it's had some detriment in terms of trying to you know, trying to grow in your career. But the thing is like a lot of a lot of people that are at the top of their field are like different executives, have kind of or need a wider range sometimes because they came up in one very narrow part, they're softer in another area. So I think, yeah, just kind of tackling things that I want to tackle and sometimes, um, it's hard to kind of break out of different boxes that people put you in. But I find it much more enjoyable to be able to do all the things that I want to work on instead of just kind of some one narrow field.
Speaker 3:My first project I was ever on at Accenture and it was really interesting, because a lot of people get hired to Accenture and you just get hired for a general, open role. You don't get hired for a spot at a client. They're like hey, we need an analyst in digital marketing. They hire an analyst in digital marketing and then they find you a client later. Well, I got hired specifically for a client role where they needed someone who is a digital marketer, someone who is fairly tech savvy but not a developer, someone who's kind of a marketer but they're not a Photoshop person right To sit in between and really translate. You know what does the business want, how does marketing want to execute it, and then we own the development team of how's the development team going to actually build it right? So I was essentially an analyst on the project and I think it was so important in my career because I had to do so many different things.
Speaker 3:It was website building, it was website maintaining, it was analytics, it was SEO, we managed their consumer database. So email campaigns, SMS campaigns, and it really gave me a huge breadth in the marketing world when a lot of people, right off the bat, it's like hey, you're a paid ad person world where a lot of people, right off the bat, it's like hey, you're a paid ad person and you're just paid ads. So I get to understand everything in the digital marketing space, at least in the space that I was in, which was really cool. It set me up for great success in the future because I had a lot of experience doing a lot of different things.
Speaker 1:That was awesome and honestly I can add to this when I was at ClickUp, I was our first sales rep, our first customer service rep. I worked almost every single job at that company, except development. I'm terrible, but I did everything. It made me much stronger as the company grew. Now what's the next part? I really believe in this one. Number four is huge. I know that people are one of the most important parts of any job any job. So when you're working in a project management, you really need to understand who this person is, what they care about, what their strengths are, how to talk to them. So you really really need to understand team dynamics and leadership.
Speaker 3:You know I've worked with a lot of different project managers over time and you know I think every single one is super strong in some areas but not as strong in the others. Right, you're going to have some that are super organized but they're not very good at putting the pen to the paper. Right, they can run a very dynamic meeting, but when it's like, hey, we need you to create this schedule now, the schedule doesn't get created. Or they're awesome at follow-up, but they're lacking in some areas. So I think it's really challenging to be awesome in all the different areas that a project manager needs to be very successful in.
Speaker 3:I do think one of the biggest things that is very challenging as a project manager that needs to be developed as a way to hold people accountable and that's the project manager's job is hey, gather the information from all the teams, how long it's going to take to do something, put that into a timeline. But if that timeline is not met, it's also your responsibility to find a way to hold people accountable for that. It's a concept of herding cats, right, like they're all doing totally different things. They all operate totally differently. You have to know each individual on your team and a lot of times, if you get to work with a team over time on several different projects, that's awesome because you really get to know your team. But myself, working for a consulting firm, I'm jumping from not just team to team internally, but also from client team to client team. So there's a lot of adaptation that needs to happen and a lot of just upfront ways of working and understanding each other to make things successful.
Speaker 2:When you're trying to like communicate a bigger goal, it's, you know, that's, that's nuanced and maybe just it's really storytelling. It's taking that story and communicating it in a good way. So a lot of like communication and being able to communicate with different types of people. Like the executive does not care about the same things that you know the engineer might care about, that the technician cares about. That's kind of how I got, I think, started into some of this as I was doing like manufacturing engineering. You talk to designers, like design engineers, and then you would talk to technicians on the floor and they care about way different things and they are like different types of people and so having to be able to like talk the language of one and then go talk the language of the other is like super important to be able to figure out, kind of what is the person I'm talking to?
Speaker 2:Like what is their mode of communication? How do they best communicate what is important to them? Like what do they understand? Like what is their kind of core competency? That I'm not going to say some words and they're going to go over their head? Or like how do I get across to them the information that I need to get across to, like, kind of make everything?
Speaker 1:work together, so you heard it directly from the source. I really undervalued how important knowing people is in project management. I know it is in general, but in project management it sounds like it's one of the most important things. And now the last lesson, something I believe in more than anything in the group. So the last two just really hit me and I realized maybe they're true for every career, but this is continuous learning and development. But the real shocker is they didn't just learn from podcasts and books, they learned from people.
Speaker 3:There's three big channels that I love for training. The first one is just the people right, people in my life, people that I work with. They have the most knowledge and experience to share and it's real. You can bounce questions off of them. I can't bounce questions off of a book. I can ask Audible all day. It's not going to give me the answer. Now maybe if I plug in a chat GBT it will answer. If I'd be like hey, answer your Patrick Lansioli from Five Dysfunctions of a Team, how would you handle the situation? You know it'll probably give me something good, but you know that wasn't really a thing.
Speaker 2:I had worked on propulsion teams before, but it's a bigger thing to like lead the whole thing. So thankfully, I have a really good kind of peer network and I asked for his recommendations on books and things. What should I like, what is like the core knowledge base to know? And uh, and went and bought all those books and went through those and then, as I had questions, then I feel like I'd like go kind of ping that network of peers and trusted sources to kind of be like am I, am I thinking, mr Right, is this correct? Or like am I missing something? Or like what did we do on on this project? Like how would you do it?
Speaker 2:So I think a lot of the stuff that I'm working on, that I that I think gets overlooked in general, is just dealing with people. So it's a lot of like people skills and a lot of those like culture books. So like like Netflix is no rules, rules or um, there's some other just really good like culture kind of how people work, like behavioral psychology type books of just how do people react to certain things or how do you kind of get people working in the right direction.
Speaker 1:You know it's funny is ClickUp would make a lot of content making fun of project managers because people don't know what they do, but Perry described what project managers are perfectly. I love this analogy.
Speaker 3:It's like I'm a gardener, right, like I planted the seed, I grew the plant, I gave the plant to you. Then I'm like, please don't kill it, right, but I have to give you all the instructions that go with it. And if you're like, hey, the leaves are getting a little wilty, feel free to reach out to me and I'll help you know how to fix it. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I am not a gardener, but from an analogy standpoint, it works.
Speaker 1:Hey, life's a garden. Better dig it. And it sounds like project managers. They really do. They are gardeners. They're just passing things along, cultivating the plant and then giving it to you to continue to grow. All right, this is the positive stuff here. I love hearing all the positives, but we know good well that we learn from the negative stuff. So you guys have had amazing careers, but you've had to make some mistakes.
Speaker 3:Tell us about your fuck ups, the classic over-promise and under-deliver, and that's really hard, right? We see these real big cool projects. We're like, yeah, we can do that, we can do that, but maybe you didn't bring in the right people to actually say can we actually do that. So, man, luckily I've never been on a project that has actually under delivered, but it's because everyone stepped up so hard and was able to deliver, and it was actually. It ended up being really cool. It was terrible in the moment, right, because if we just kept working our regular eight hour days and going at the pace that we had, it would have been under delivery, I think a lot of it isn't.
Speaker 2:in general, it's kind of like a this isn't any one person, but just kind of a type of like summing it up of like a bunch of that I've seen over the years of just like a different mindset, of like not caring about the why, like not caring about the technical part and just wanting, just like taking feedback in right, they just like, they just want what the new date is. So you say, oh, you try to explain. Okay, this date actually changed and needs to be. It kind of needs to be this, but it might change. And there's some buffer on this and I have literally heard one of them just be like I don't, I don't care, just tell me what the new date is.
Speaker 1:I love it. The good old over-promise and under-deliver that is every project manager's nightmare. But it shows that Perry said you can learn a lot from it and get out of it. So I love the way he handled it and I love that he hasn't happened again. And for Jerry, well, we can all get a little copy. I know it's happened to me, especially early on in my career. But it's a good lesson because from there you know okay, even if I do feel confident about something, I still should move cautiously. At this moment, even with no experience, I feel like I know what to come in to be a good project manager. At least I know what to study.
Speaker 1:And this framework again is communicate proactively and effectively. Make sure to keep your word. Understand and challenge assumptions. Make sure you question everything. That's how you get the real results. Adapt and wear multiple hats. Don't be afraid to dive into different things that are not in your job. Learn everything, because it makes you better at every single person's job you're working with Focus on team dynamics and leadership.
Speaker 1:Make sure you truly understand everyone's strengths, their weaknesses, how to talk to them. It makes a real difference when you're working with big teams and small teams. Learn continuously and leverage your network. Never stop learning. They still talk about books and podcasts as well. Make sure you're asking other people. Find groups, find people who are also project managers, because that's how you win and get ahead. I'm going to keep this going, so let me know what job you want to learn about next and let's find out how to be the best at everything in B2B. That's why I'm the B2B MC. Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, Peace, peace, peace, peace.