How Condé Nast Made Me a Project Manager

-

Not every career advancement is the result of a deliberate plan. Sometimes the right environment finds you at the right moment, and what you do with that opportunity determines everything that follows.

After working at Zepinvest, a small New York City startup, I had developed a working foundation in content curation, content management, basic HTML, and the practical realities of keeping a web presence running. It was hands-on, scrappy work, and it prepared me well for what came next. My following role was as a web producer at Condé Nast, a considerably larger stage with considerably higher expectations. I did not know it at the time, but that position would become one of the most formative experiences of my professional life.

In my early days as a web producer I sat in conference rooms where conversations about projects, products, and timelines felt like a foreign language. People moved through discussions with a fluency I did not yet have, and I spent more than a few meetings simply trying to orient myself. That discomfort turned out to be productive. Within the first year I had learned the language, begun contributing meaningfully, and caught the attention of a new manager who arrived with a clear directive: the team was going to professionalize as project managers. I followed that direction, invested in the transition, and within a year was promoted to Associate Project Manager.

My first assignment in that role was Wired.com, which had been acquired from Lycos and had not yet had a dedicated project manager. One of my first major initiatives was leading the consolidation of all the site's WordPress blogs onto a single control panel, a technically complex effort given the degree of customization across the blogs and the variety of versions involved. Around the same time, Condé Nast provided me with certified ScrumMaster training, which I put to immediate use. I introduced daily standups to the team, a modest but meaningful step that significantly reduced the number of alignment meetings required to keep work moving. It was not a full Agile transformation, but it was a demonstration of what even incremental process improvement can do for a team's productivity and focus.

Condé Nast also invested in my PMP exam preparation, a commitment I did not take lightly. The combination of practical experience, formal Scrum training, and PMP preparation gave me a professional foundation that I have drawn on throughout the fifteen years since. The role ended, as many do, through circumstances outside my control. A reorganization eliminated the leadership layer above me, and the effects eventually reached my position as well. I have no bitterness about it. Organizations restructure, and good work done inside a company does not disappear when the role does.

What Condé Nast gave me was a career. I arrived as someone learning the language of project management from the back of the room. I left as a credentialed project manager with real delivery experience and a growing understanding of how to lead teams through change. The lesson I carry from that chapter is one worth sharing: when an organization invests in your development and creates space for you to grow, show up fully for it. The opportunity may not last forever, but what you build during it will.

Popular posts from this blog

The Dual Faces of Technology: Enhancing and Replacing Jobs

-
Image
Automation has been on my mind a lot lately, more immediately due to a book I read , but also because of the looming reality of artificial intelligence. To understand what's involved, making the distinction between replacing technologies and enabling technologies is crucial. As we traverse the timeline of the 20th century, we observe how each type of technology has distinctly influenced employment. Automated technologies have transformed industries by replacing manual labor with machines. Consider the automated switchboards introduced in the early 20th century. Previously, telephone operators manually connected calls using physical connectors on a switchboard. With the advent of automated switchboards in the 1920s and 1930s, many of these jobs were eliminated as calls were routed through electromechanical systems. Similarly, in agriculture, the introduction of mechanical harvesters like the combine harvester in the 1930s drastically reduced the need for manual labor. These machine...
Read more

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor and Power in the Age of Automation (Book Review)

-
Image
In his compelling book, " The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation ," Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping examination of the historical and ongoing impact of mechanization and automation on society. Starting with the onset of the first Industrial Revolution, Frey deftly navigates through the evolution of technology up to the modern age of artificial intelligence, presenting a nuanced view of how technological innovations have reshaped labor markets and power dynamics. Frey categorizes technological innovations into two types: enabling technologies, like the typewriter, which enhance worker productivity without displacing the labor force, and replacing technologies, such as robotic machinery in factories, which eliminate certain job roles altogether. This distinction forms the backbone of Frey’s analysis, as he explores the varying implications of each type of technology on different segments of the workforce. The book traces a historical patter...
Read more

Deputy Product Owners

-
Image
"The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. The Product Owner may represent the desires of a committee in the Product Backlog, but those wanting to change a Product Backlog item’s priority must address the Product Owner." - The Scrum Guide There are a lot of ways in which my approach to Scrum differs from what's in the official guide, and since that document refers to Scrum as 'immutable,' let's just call what I do 'Notscrum™.' In Scrum, there is only one product owner per team. That person is the sole person responsible for the product backlog, and the person who advocates for the work to be done. In Notscrum there is one product owner, but there can be multiple deputy product owners. Here's how it works. When my program at Viacom was first forming I met with the then-director of the Library & Archive group and learned that while he set the priorities on work done, the archivists were organized in three distinct areas with a team lead ...
Read more