The Reality of Working as a Remote Project Manager
By: Julian Paul
Tags: Project Management, Structure, Personal Development, Remote Work, Startup

From StartupGuide LinkedIn

In August 2020 year I was approached by the Startup Guide to Project Manage their upcoming Startup Guide Germany Project, which is a larger version of what is usually a localised approach to cover cities. This one contains 5 different regions and shifts the typical startup scene focus to cover more of the social impact and sustainability sector.

At Startup Guide, we feature 6 different types of organisations: Startup, Space, Program, School, Investors & Founders. By categorising the companies, Project Managers can easily distinguish the requirements needed for each feature, as some are shorter and others longer. As Startup Guide is in media and publishing, my duties fell into content production management:

Cold B2B Email Outreaches — according to the category’s requirements. Scheduling and management of bringing together journalists and the companies themselves — to produce accurate and unique articles. Management of image collection to accompany the interview. Management & collection of image rights. Ensuring timeline deliveries and deadline on the sides of both the journalists & companies being featured.

All in all, I was contracted to work 4 months and ended up with 100+ companies featured. It was hectic and draining, as most of it was based on communication through email and chasing down leads in order to ensure the timely delivery of content before the deadlines I set. In order to stay on-top of things, I needed to track the status of each company through a project management system to make sense of it all. In my case: monday.com (seen left). But of course I did not work on the entire book by myself. Whereas I had the responsibility to manage the entirety of the content production by myself, I was working directly under my boss, who’s role is the Global Production Lead in the Startup Guide. Our work together required a great deal of collaboration, as content related matters such as determining the scope of an article a journalist has to write is hardly something I can call the shots on as a contracted consultant.

Through this experience I’ve learnt that Project Management can take a variety of formats… but here it has everything to do with managing client — stakeholder relations and expectations, as my job was not only to be a friendly front towards the organisations & journalists without getting irritated or frustrated by very odd actions or the requests clients made. But it was also work in classical Sales, where I had to convince the client to participate, even though they might not have seen the relevance to their organisation (yet). This especially occurred during email follow-up conversations and of course many many Cold Calls I made towards the end of the books content production deadline on 30.11.2020. A completely new area for me, as I had to learn how to approach various different characters, who had no idea who I was & then sell them a feature in the Startup Guide Germany book. As a controlled introvert myself, this process was definitely challenging, but also very rewarding — once initial hostility ceased and excitement took its place.