Why Project Management is a Fundamentally Entrepreneurial Role
As the Editor here at DPM, I have the pleasure of speaking with delivery leaders and project managers about their experiences and predictions for the future of the field. One idea keeps surfacing in these conversations: the project manager as an entrepreneur — or, as one expert put it, a "mini-CEO."
It's a framing that's hard to dismiss. As AI pushes PMs from tactical to strategic and from tech consumers to builders, the entrepreneurial PM starts to look less like a metaphor and more like a job description.
So, I decided to investigate — talking to several leaders in the space about what it actually means for PMs to run projects the way founders and CEOs run organizations.
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The Rise of the "Mini-CEO"
Jeremiah Hammon, Leadership and Project Manager Trainer at Project Revolution, has spent more than 20 years in the field — and he has a bold prediction for where the role is heading. "The role is going to be more like a mini-CEO," he says, arguing that the profession has long undersold itself.
Too often, he explains, PMs are slotted into narrow execution roles when their actual scope is far broader: "A lot of us get pushed into a little corner and we're told that we have to just be the doers — when really we are the strategic leaders."
A lot of us get pushed into a little corner and we’re told that we have to just be the doers — when really we are the strategic leaders.
That reframing isn't just motivational. For Hammon, it has direct implications for how PMs engage with the business: "We have to understand the financial objectives. And when we understand that, we can make decisions that add value to the organization, the company, and then also the customers."
Vision-casting, buy-in, and leading without full ownership
If project management is an entrepreneurial discipline, then the job description reads a lot like a CEO's or a founder's: vision-casting, gaining buy-in, delivering results they don't fully own — these are the core competencies Hammon returns to again and again.
"When they hand us the project, we have to then cast a vision to the team members to get buy-in and commitment," he says. "We have to be really good in leadership, communication, casting a vision, and letting team members know not only what we have to achieve, but who we have to become to achieve that."
And, like any entrepreneur, a PM rarely holds the reins on everything. "We don't control anything," Hammon says plainly. "We have to be able to influence that."
We don't control anything. We have to be able to influence that.
Understanding the business — not just the project
Here's where the mini-CEO analogy gets most interesting. A CEO doesn't just manage execution — they're accountable for outcomes, and they make decisions through the lens of what's good for the business. The best PMs do the same. The problem is that many don't.
Bill Dow, Director of Enterprise PMO, UW Medicine, puts it bluntly: "We have a lot of checkbox PMs. But, the value is in the strategy. The value is in the decision making. Do you actually know the project you're running? Not just what are the risks and the schedule — do you know the business outcome, the ROI?"
It's a pointed question, and the answer matters. Because when a PM understands the business outcome behind a project, it changes how they make every decision inside it. Bruno Morgante, Founder and CEO at Mantegora, frames it as a failure of perspective, telling PMs to "Stop looking at projects as your only thing. Your project is always a small piece of a big puzzle. Start looking at the big picture."
Stop looking at projects as your only thing. Your project is always a small piece of a big puzzle. Start looking at the big picture.
Emmanuels Magaya, Founder, Project Managers Africa, frames it in the simplest terms possible: "Ultimately, you're helping the business make money. You need to think beyond a project plan, beyond chasing stakeholders, and think about how your work actually helps the business get more clients, serve customers better." The checkbox PM never gets there. The entrepreneurial one never loses sight of it.
Entrepreneurism is baked into many PM methodologies
For Hammon, the connection between PM work and entrepreneurial thinking isn't new — it's baked into the methodology. "Project management is perfect for entrepreneurism," he says. ‘
Project management is perfect for entrepreneurism.
He points to Scrum as proof: "The most successful high-performing engine of the world is the Scrum framework. And when people dive into being an entrepreneur, the number one thing they see that moves a business forward — what the most successful people are doing, is they're using Scrum." There’s a reason why Scrum and other Agile methodologies are commonly referenced in popular entrepreneurial books like The Lean Startup – it's because they accelerate the entrepreneurial journey.
However, in the age of AI, two things have changed about Agile: the speed of iteration and who is doing the iterating. AI has not only collapsed the distance between having an idea and shipping a solution, but it has also made it possible for non-developers to ship tech solutions.
How AI is accelerating the entrepreneurial PM
Recently, I spoke with PMs about vibecoding — building tools with AI — and found firsthand that the entrepreneurial instinct shows up most obviously here: identify a gap, build a solution, and get people to adopt it.
Aniket Ghonge, a Senior Supply Chain Manager at Amazon, found that his CRM lacked the niche capabilities his team needed and was costing him hours of manual work every week. His response was classically entrepreneurial: he identified the pain point, validated the idea, built a solution, and got his colleagues to adopt it. "That's where I built an onboarding intelligent dashboard," he explains, "reducing my 18 hours of work to less than an hour for thousands of accounts."
Dixie Willard, Founder & Chief Project Strategist at Poised & Plumb, took the same approach from a different angle. After years working in interior design, she kept running into workflow gaps that off-the-shelf software couldn't fill. "There are a lot of things that designers could use that just don't exist," she says. So she built them herself — proprietary tools that have since been adopted on her team.
What does this mean for leaders developing PM talent?
If the PM role is fundamentally entrepreneurial, then developing junior PMs means more than teaching tools and processes — it means building the mindset that can operate without a playbook.
It starts with what leaders expose their PMs to. Rawad Baroud, CEO of ZeroGPT, describes a deliberate shift in how he developed his own team: "I stopped treating strategic development as something that happened after project approval. Instead, I started bringing project managers into conversations before projects existed — when leaders were still debating priorities, tradeoffs, and business impact." The entrepreneurial PM isn't waiting for the project to land in their lap. They're already in the room where the decision is being made.
I started bringing project managers into conversations before projects existed — when leaders were still debating priorities, tradeoffs, and business impact.
It also means knowing when to step back. Travis Rieken, Sr. Director of Marketing at Easy Ice, is direct about what that requires: "The goal isn't a PM who executes your thinking really well. The goal is a PM who thinks well without you in the room." That kind of independence doesn't develop through more oversight — it develops through less.
Guillermo Ginesta, Managing Partner APAC at Brinc, found that one of the most effective ways to accelerate that development was changing what he asked his PMs to bring to him: "Do not bring me the problem first. Bring me the decision the client needs to make, the consequence of waiting, and your recommended next move."
What’s next
The checkbox PM has always been valuable. But the checkbox PM is also the most replaceable — by a better process, a smarter tool, or increasingly, by AI. What's harder to replace is judgment. Strategic thinking. The ability to walk into a room, read what the business actually needs, and lead people toward an outcome nobody handed you a plan for.
That's not a project management skillset. That's an entrepreneurial one.
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