Project Managers Who Deliver Outcomes Will Thrive. The Rest Won’t.

The Agentic Existential Crisis

As with all good things, in order to understand the future, we need to understand the past. But in this case, the very recent past.

When the idea of agentic project management hit the headlines in late-2024, my community of digital project managers immediately threw up their arms — insulted that anyone could think we could be replaced with AI.

Our job as project leaders was to drive effective collaboration, solve complex problems, continuously assess delivery risk, and keep the ship pointed towards the treasure. We weren’t just nagging people about deadlines, taking notes during meetings, and spewing status updates into the void.

But that revealed a bigger problem. Most non-PMs didn’t see it that way.

The Branding Problem

Fundamentally it revealed a branding problem. Between the agency owners replacing their PM teams with junior administrators to the devs and creatives on reddit vehemently insisting that project managers do nothing, very few people seemed to hold the role in high regard.

In fact, it really didn’t take much convincing for people to be persuaded that a robot could do the job. 

And maybe that perception isn’t entirely wrong: there are definitely project managers out there who are valued as organized back-of-house coordinators that keep the trains running on time using brute force, not necessarily strategic specialists exuding leadership qualities.

Heck, even for the more forward-facing project leaders, we are mostly seen as defenders of the triple constraint — the “computer says no” inspiration crushers — not clever and opportunistic business minds.

Lead Smarter in the Age of AI

Join the DPM community for access to exclusive content, practical templates, member-only events, and weekly leadership insights - it’s free to join.

Sign up with LinkedIn

Or sign up with email:

LinkedIn

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Name*

First name Last name

Business email*

This field is hidden when viewing the form

Free Account Module

Bottom BarLanding PageFooterInlinePop UpSidebarSSO

LinkedIn profile

Seniority*

Select an optionExecutive / C-suiteVPDirectorManagerIndividual ContributorOther

Company's AI adoption maturity*

Select an optionExploring opportunitiesRunning pilotsScaling adoptionEmbedded in the business model

The Behaviour Problem

But it would be foolish to think that us project leaders are just victims here and aren’t in some way culpable for perpetuating these misconceptions. 

Even in the years leading up to the agentic AI insurrection, project leaders in my community and beyond have felt the need to justify our value… heck, our existence! But in doing so we were stuck looking at what we were already doing instead of looking towards where our roles were heading. 

We were calling ourselves strategic leaders, but not all of us were actually behaving like strategic leaders — we were just giving ourselves the badge without understanding what it meant.

We continued to mislabel high-value ideas as scope creep. We continued to pride ourselves on delivering on-time by compromising on quality. We continued to protect margins instead of finding ways to amplify impact.

We were bold and decisive, and that felt like leadership.

But as the sacred proverb goes, “sticking feathers up your butt doesn’t make you a chicken.” And the folks just wearing the t-shirt without changing their behaviour weren’t fooling anyone. In fact, they were doing even more damage to how project leaders are perceived.

So then what do you do when the whole world seems to want to replace you with AI?

What It Is: Outcomes Versus Outputs

First we need to define what we mean by outcome. In a nutshell, outcomes are results — the realization of the goal or value, not just a step towards it. I came across a post the other day that summed it up well: it said, “The operation was a success. The patient is dead.” In other words, completing the steps and following a plan doesn’t mean a project will achieve its outcome. 

Let’s anchor that in reality a bit: let’s say your project’s stated objective is to increase operational efficiency on the customer success team by implementing a CRM whose AI notetaker can update records automatically. 

Fine.

But that isn’t quite the whole picture. If you zoom out, you might realize that the gains in operational efficiency are meant to make room for planning and sitting more strategic calls with existing accounts to increase renewal rates by 10% in Q3 and Q4 in order to hit this year’s target and secure the next round of outside investment. That would likely require at least a 30% reduction in time spent manually updating CRM records and a separate program to upskill the team on strategic account management. 

So actually the desired outcome is to reduce admin time by 30% as Q3 begins so that a financial goal that unlocks company growth can be met.

How To Drive Outcomes

You might be asking: “but does a project leader really control that outcome?” And that’s the right question. The answer is “not exactly”. In fact, we’re rarely around to see the outcome be fully realized. But we can help facilitate decisions throughout the project that increase the likelihood of achieving the desired outcome. 

Returning to our example, your lens has now shifted from rolling out a CRM to enabling a business goal. You now know that the sooner you reduce time your CS team spends doing manual tasks, the more time they’ll be able to spend driving renewal revenue. You also now know that even if you reduce their admin time by 50%, the outcome still depends on an entirely separate program — the upskilling program. More time on their hands won’t equate to revenue unless they’ve been trained to do account planning. 

So now you can ask questions like: 

• How might we be able to deliver incremental value sooner?
• How can we ensure that our CRM program and the upskilling program are delivered in sync?
• Is there an opportunity to spend 10% more to amplify our impact by 100%?

For example, if there’s an opportunity to reduce the CS team’s manual administrative tasks by 20% in Q2 by building a simple agent and an MCP server so the CS team can start increasing renewal revenue sooner, that might be something you raise to your project sponsor instead of just following the plan. 

Or if someone on the team suggests a different CRM that the CSM team isn’t familiar with, you might push back on the basis of adoption risk instead of spending the time putting a proposal together for your stakeholders.

And if the team running the upskilling program needs a resource that you have, you might sacrifice that resource to make sure their program lands when yours does, knowing that a new CRM without the training around strategic account management doesn’t have a hope in hell of achieving the desired outcome. 

Do you control the outcome completely? Heck no. But can you surface insights and facilitate decisions help increase the chance of achieving the outcome? Definitely.

5 Core Skills Of An Outcome-Based Mindset

Fundamentally this comes down to mindset. The way I see it, it’s about balancing at the fulcrum between being risk-averse and reckless — between sticking to a plan and being a creative opportunist.

To do that, I think there’s 5 core skills that can take you there:

1. Understanding the business context. If you don’t know how your business works or how your client’s business works — including the goals, the value flywheel, the revenue model, and the competitive landscape — you won’t be able to see the opportunities, little less have the conversations. 
2. Understanding the definition of value.Project delivery is rarely the value in and of itself. Value realization is about making a measurable and defensible contribution to the way the business is able to achieve its goals. 
3. Being open to opportunities. Whether you’re using a predictive approach or an adaptive one — or something in between — it’s very easy to want to resist changes to the plan. But if you can become someone with a reputation for identifying opportunities that might require a change of plans, you’re already halfway there.
4. Being persuasive in tough conversations. To seal the deal, you then need to become excellent at making your case. As the project leader, you probably don’t have the authority to make these decisions, so you’ll need to speak the language of the executive sponsor, surface the options and implications, and put forward a compelling recommendation. 
5. Following through. This one is obvious but important: if your stakeholders agree to go along with your recommendation, you need to be ready to follow through. You own this new plan now — including all the blame if it goes sideways.

Two Things You Can Do Differently Right Away

This transformation will, of course, take time. But you can give yourself some momentum out of the gate by starting to change your behaviour in two key ways:

1. Embrace positive risk

Most project managers are trained on negative risk: there's a risk that resourcing issues may cause us to miss our deadline, so we should have backup plans. But positive risk is opportunity: if we negotiate a better price on this software, we might cascade that savings across all departments, netting $20,000 per year in reduced overhead.

But don’t go overboard: no one wants a PM who keeps pitching ideas instead of keeping the project on track. Every pitch is your reputation on the line.

2. Change the way you talk about what you do

Stop saying we babysit teams and herd cats. Stop saying your job is to “get sh*t done” and “keep things on rails” — none of those things sound valuable — even if they do create value. They all sound like things that not only can be replaced with AI, but should be replaced with AI.

If we can develop the vocabulary to describe our value and the willingness to say it out loud without undercutting ourselves, we can start re-educating our industries to see our potential. We can start to be seen as people who belong at the table.

How This Will Create Winners & Losers

At the start of this rant, I said that there would be a split that divides the craft of project leadership into two camps. Here’s what I mean: project management as we know it will go out “not with a bang, but with a whimper”. There won’t be some big judgment day where Thanos makes 50% of project leaders disappear.

Here’s what will happen instead. 

There will be one camp that continues to do the role but with higher expectations. Lead more projects. Herd more cats. The human Uber drivers watching as the autonomous vehicle technology gets better and better.

Then there will be the other camp — the “creative business brains” camp. The camp that is willing to read the tea leaves and use all the tools and knowledge available (including AI!) to make a bet on something that AI would never make a bet on — something that’s never been done before. Something unorthodox. Something unprecedented. Something human. Something that drives an outcome like nothing AI has ever been trained on. 

Because the underlying truth is this: AI is actually getting really good at doing things we used to take pride in doing. And the line between “PM using AI” and “AI humouring us by keeping us in the loop” is getting uncomfortably blurry. 

But an outcomes-based mindset is the differentiator. It’s the creativity, the persuasion, the collaboration, the decision-making, and the thrill-seeking that leads to innovation and impact, not just automation and homogeneity.

What Do You Think?

What do you think? Is the “outcomes over outputs” mantra just a buzzword and a coping mechanism for our current existential crisis? Or is it the future of the role of the project leader? Let me know in the comments!