PM of All Trades: The Many Hats PMs Are Wearing in 2026
Role Expansion: Project managers are increasingly covering roles traditionally held by developers and account managers.
AI Influence: AI-driven workflows are contributing to the expansion of PM responsibilities and creating communication gaps.
Human Focus: With automation handling tasks, PMs are now focusing more on team morale and counseling.
Change Management: Project managers often step into change management roles when organizations lack dedicated expertise.
Operational Versatility: Broader responsibilities can enhance business understanding but may stretch project managers' bandwidth.
The project manager role has never been perfectly contained. But something has shifted. Leaner teams, faster-moving AI-assisted workflows, and widening organizational gaps are pulling PMs further from their original job descriptions than ever before.
The result is a new kind of practitioner — one who still owns delivery, but also covers ground that used to belong to developers, account managers, change leads, HR, and more. The PMs who are living this shift have a lot to say about it.
Wearing the developer hat
For PMs who came up through technical backgrounds, the ask to step outside the PM lane often starts there. Jennifer Goebel, Project Coordinator at Baker Marketing Laboratory, describes a dynamic that will be familiar to anyone working at a leaner agency: "I am 20% developer. So I try to keep it at 20%, but there are times colleagues will say, ‘We need this small page. Can you do this?'"
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On smaller teams, being a jack-of-all-trades can help fill critical gaps when the rest of the team is at capacity. However, the informal nature of asking someone to do something outside their role shows us that role creep rarely arrives with a formal announcement. It shows up in a Slack message. Of course, sometimes the work is a nice change of pace, but when it happens routinely, it could result in you having a whole new role. Title change, anyone?
Stepping into account management and business development
The stretch beyond delivery often lands PMs squarely in client and business territory. For Goebel, the expansion has moved even beyond the technical: "I'm also being asked to do strategic things that affect our company, business-wise, that four months ago wasn't on my radar at all. It's almost an account manager's type of role. I don't think I ever thought that'd be on my bingo card."
It’s [her new duties] almost an account manager’s type of role. I don’t think I ever thought that’d be on my bingo card.
Cache Merrill, Founder and Delivery Lead at Zibtek, has experienced a similar pull in the business direction. "Over the past year, I've taken on a lot more operational and client-facing responsibilities alongside delivery management," he says, noting that he ended up "spending more time handling client alignment, internal planning discussions, release coordination, and even helping shape product decisions during delivery instead of focusing only on project tracking."
For Merrill, part of what drove the shift was the pace of AI-assisted development outrunning the surrounding processes — creating communication and decision-making gaps that someone had to fill.
Counselor, motivator, morale keeper
As AI absorbs more of the administrative and logistical work that once filled a PM's day, something else is filling that space: people work. Michael Gold, Fractional Head of Delivery at Gold Project Management, has felt this shift acutely. "I find myself much more of a counselor than I had ever considered myself before," he says. "I guess AI is giving me more time to strategize, to think about how best to communicate with people, check in on people, ensure my team is motivated, and morale is high. So, there is a little bit more counseling and motivation, even more than before." The implication is significant: when AI handles the task management, the PM's most irreplaceable value becomes human.
AI is giving me more time to strategize, to think about how to best communicate with people, check in on people, ensure my team is motivated, and morale is high.
Change management lead
Organizational gaps have a way of finding their way to the PM's desk, and change management is one of the most common. Kiron Bondale puts it plainly: “If your organization lacks change management expertise, then sometimes that role may fall on the PM to make sure that they're marshaling change champions across the stakeholder groups that are going to be impacted and that they're communicating the impacts of the changes."
If your organization lacks change management expertise, then sometimes that role may fall on the PM.
PMs becoming Change Managers is less about PMs volunteering for extra work and more about necessity — when no one else is equipped to manage change, the project manager is often the closest thing to someone who can.
Compliance officer, logistics lead, sales rep — the operational stretch
Some PMs are absorbing responsibilities that extend well beyond anything adjacent to project delivery. Derek Bruce, Operations Director at SMSTS Course, describes a scope that spans nearly every function in his organization: "The title I have is Operations Director, but I'm also acting as project manager, compliance officer, and leading customer support."
The expansion hasn't stopped there. Bruce notes that he has "been forced to have direct sales conversations with corporate clients, bring some professionalism to logistics for training delivery and even make product decisions when they shift," adding that "the reason is simple, companies are leaner and even though AI speeds up workflows, it does not take away the required judgement."
The title I have is Operations Director, but I’m also acting as project manager, compliance officer, and leading customer support.
Olivia, a Construction Consultant at Viking Metal Garages, describes a parallel experience in a very different industry. "Along with project management, I now help with client support, proposal writing, hiring, and training new team members," she says. The on-the-ground reality of that breadth became clear during one particularly stretched period: "During one busy period, we had a high number of steel garage installation inquiries while also training new hires. I had to step into both operations and support roles just to keep things moving."
AI accelerates the role expansion
Across industries, AI is showing up as both a cause of role expansion and a tool PMs are using to manage it. Isha Dagdu, Senior Program Manager, describes how access to enterprise-level AI tools opened up new opportunities to deliver value beyond traditional PM outputs. With AI agents giving associates broader access across the organization, Dagdu took the initiative to build something new: "I created a web UI Program Dashboard with program information that mattered to my CXOs, SVPs, VPs & Directors. Within a few minutes, Claude created an outstanding dashboard." It's a concrete example of how PMs are using AI fluency itself as a new skill set — one that wasn't in the job description a few years ago.
Merrill points to a less straightforward dynamic: "On one project, AI tools started accelerating parts of development much faster than the surrounding workflows could adapt. That created gaps across communication and decision-making." Speed, in other words, doesn't distribute evenly — and PMs are often the ones who have to bridge the uneven terrain it leaves behind.
On one project, AI tools started accelerating parts of development much faster than the surrounding workflows could adapt. That created gaps across communication and decision-making.
Welcomed change — or bandwidth breaker?
Whether this expansion feels like growth or overload depends largely on the person experiencing it — and often, it's both at once. Bruce is candid about the tradeoff: "This is great in terms of visibility over the business, but it stretches bandwidth to breaking point and dilutes attention. On the plus side, it makes operational leaders like me more versatile but brings with it a risk to depth."
For Olivia, the expanded scope eventually revealed something valuable: "Over time, I started understanding the business better as a whole. I now see how closely customer communication, hiring, and project delivery are connected." That kind of systemic understanding — hard-won through doing too many jobs at once — may be the unexpected upside of the PM-of-all-trades era.
Whether it's improved your understanding of the business you're in or just caused you to feel overwhelmed, the PM role is expanding, whether or not anyone formally decided it should.
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