After scaling your team and building trust, a new challenge emerges: multiple programs, multiple OEMs, each with their own priorities, expectations, and timelines. Suddenly, your team isn’t just managing ten projects, it is managing ten projects for three different OEMs , spanning legacy programs, new launches, and proof-of-concept initiatives, all competing for attention. Everything feels urgent, and pressure comes from all directions. This is the stage where many PMs and even experienced managers get stuck. When every customer thinks their program is the most important, it’s easy to default to reactive mode, answering the loudest voice, firefighting whichever crisis surfaces first. The result is chaos, misaligned priorities, and exhausted teams. The first step to handling this is objective prioritization . Not “I feel like this matters more,” but systematic evaluation of impact, risk, and dependencies . Questions that help: Which program has the most critical deadlines for certi...
Scaling from three project managers to ten changes everything. Suddenly, you can’t attend every meeting. You have more than one or two OEMs to serve, often across several different programs, some legacy, some the next production production, some at the POC stage. You don’t see every email. You start hearing about problems second-hand, and that is deeply uncomfortable. Up to this point, visibility was total. You knew the customer mood. You knew the weak spots. You knew when something felt off before it showed up in a report. Scaling breaks that illusion immediately. Many people fail at this stage because they cling to control. They jump back into details, override decisions, and reinsert themselves into conversations that no longer require them. The message sent is rarely intentional, but it is received clearly: trust is conditional. The outcome is predictable. The team stops owning outcomes. Decisions are delayed. Escalations increase. People start managing upward instead of m...