Corporate folklore holds that the surest way to find a project manager is to trawl the aquarium for the fattest subject-matter fish. Whoever knows the most about the content, runs the lore, must surely be the best to run the project. This is wrong in the same way that Instagram influencers’ “science” is wrong: it confuses adornment with aerodynamics.
Seasoned project managers know the ritual. You’re vetted by an intermediary whose first sacramental question is, “Do you have experience with System XYZ?” Answer “No,” and the catechism concludes: “Too bad—client insists on deep XYZ expertise.” Your history of delivering complex efforts on time and budget is waved away. Content is king; competence is court jester.
Consider the farce as it would look in any other arena. You’re hiring someone to organize a rock festival. The decisive criterion? Not whether they can plan logistics, wrangle suppliers, manage risk, and keep 50,000 humans watered, fed, and untrampled—but whether they can play lead guitar and recite Metallica’s back catalog. That they have already staged jazz, film, and food-truck festivals with aplomb counts for little. If they can’t shred, they can’t shepherd.
Thus does expertise in the product masquerade as expertise in the process.
Appointing a project manager on content alone is selecting the right man for the wrong job—and then blaming him when he does the job he was selected for. You have, in effect, hired a fan to run security.
Two pathologies follow. First, conflict of interest. A project manager’s cardinal duty is adjudication: trading scope against time against money, and doing so without emotional attachment to any single feature. The domain obsessive—our rock purist—will be tempted to spend the medical tent on an extra band, because the music moves him more than the ambulance does. Affection is not governance.
Second, loss of altitude. The subject-matter manager cannot help plunging into the weeds, second-guessing the very specialists they hired. They meddle because they know, and because knowing feels like managing. Meanwhile, the real work—forecasting cost, policing risk, sequencing dependencies, choreographing change—goes malnourished.
These are the project managers who brief the Steering Committee with breathless technical minutiae about a change request, yet cannot produce an up-to-date cost forecast, a living risk profile, or the mitigations that make unpleasant surprises merely expensive rather than fatal.
Put differently: they’re backstage tuning guitars and arguing over the set list while no one is erecting the ticket booths, stocking the concessions, or ensuring that the toilets, those unglamorous guarantors of civilization, actually function. The music may be sublime; the festival will still fail.
The remedy is drearily adult. Hire project managers for the thing they do: impose structure, price risk, arbitrate trade-offs, and keep promises. Let experts be experts, accountable for outputs within their craft. Demand of the project lead not devotion to a domain but fidelity to delivery. If you must worship something, worship the schedule and the balance sheet; they, unlike taste, can be audited.
Otherwise, by all means keep privileging virtuosity over vigilance. Just don’t feign astonishment when the solos soar and the crowd stampedes.
