Project Management

Want to stay motivated every single day? Borrow a strategy from Harvard. Then borrow another from stand up comedy. Together, theyre a powerhouse for momentum, motivation, and mastery. Heres how it works: Lets start with Harvard. Researcher Teresa Amabile studied 12,000 daily work diaries across 8 companies. She wanted to know: What truly motivates people on a day to day basis? What she found changed how we understand drive. The #1 driver of daily motivation wasnt: Money Praise Perks It was progress. The days people made progress on meaningful work were the days they felt the best. Progress isnt a luxury. Its a psychological necessity. So how do we make progress feel visible especially on days when its not? Use a Progress Ritual. At the end of the day, pause. Write down 3 small ways you moved forward. Thats it. No fanfare. Just ritual. This works because we rarely notice our progress in real time. It gets buried under busyness, meetings, and mental noise. The act of looking back gives your brain the reward it needs to keep going. Momentum builds from meaning. Now lets add some comedy. Young Jerry Seinfeld had one goal: write new material every day. To stay on track, he created a brilliant system. Each day he wrote, he put a big red X on his calendar. Soon, a chain of Xs formed. And heres the key: Dont break the chain. One red X becomes two. Two becomes ten. Ten becomes identity. Whether youre writing, coding, or training Daily action + visual chain = long-term motivation. Summary: The Two-Part Motivation System From Harvard: Record 3 ways you made progress each day. From Seinfeld: Mark an X for each day you show up then dont break the chain. Progress fuels purpose. Consistency fuels confidence. Apply both and youll stay on track especially on the tough days. Because when your days get better, your weeks get better. When your weeks get better, your months get better. When your months get better, your life gets better. It starts with one small win today.

They didnt even cc me. This was how Yumi, a senior marketing director, found out her billion-dollar product had been repositioned, without her input. The project she had been leading for 18 months was suddenly reporting into someone else. She didnt mess up. She wasnt underperforming. She just wasnt "there". Not at the executive offsite. Not at the Friday golf and growth circle. Not at the CEOs birthday dinner her male peer casually got invited to. She was busy being excellent. They were busy being bonded. When she asked her boss about the change, he was surprised: Youre usually aligned with the bigger picture, so we assumed itd be fine. In Workplace politic-ish: Yumi was predictable. Available. Yet not powerful enough to be consulted. What actually happened here? Women are told to build relationships. Men build alliances. Women maintain connections. Men maintain relevance in power circles. Its not about how many people like you. Its about how many people speak your name when youre not in the room. And in most companies, the real decisions - about budget, headcount, succession, are made off-the-clock and off-the-record. So, how do you stop getting edited out of influence? Try these: 1. . Not the org chart. The whisper network / shadow organistion. Who gets invited to early product reviews? Who influences without title? Start mapping that! 2. - . If your name hasnt been mentioned by 3 different people in senior leadership this month, you are invisible to power, even if youre a top performer. 3. . Skip the webinars and female empowerment panels. Start showing up where strategy happens: QBRs, investor briefings, offsite planning, cross-functional war rooms. 4. . Schedule recurring 1:1s with lateral stakeholders, not to catch up, but to co-build. Influence travels faster across than up. 5. . If you vanished for 2 weeks and no one noticed, youre not central enough to promote. If any of this feels raw, its because it is. Brilliant women are being rewritten out of their own stories, not for lack of performance, but for lack of positioning. Thats why Uma, Grace and I created : A course for women who are done watching strategic mediocrity rise while they wait for recognition. Its not about becoming someone else. Its about learning the rules that were never designed for us, and playing like you intend to win. Get it if youre ready, link in comment. Or wait until they assume youd be aligned, too.

Stuck in an endless loop of client changes? Lost track of what revision this constitutes? Yeah. Been there. Done that. The secret? It's not about saying no. It's about saying yes to the right things upfront. Every project that goes sideways starts the same way: Vague agreements. Fuzzy boundaries. Good intentions. Six weeks later you're bleeding money and everyone's frustrated. Here's my framework after 30 years of running two 8-figure businesses: The SOW is your salvation. Not some boilerplate template. A real document that covers: Exact deliverables (not "design work" but "3 homepage concepts, 2 rounds of revisions") Hours of operation ("We respond M-F, 9-5 PST. Weekend requests get Monday responses") Revision rounds spelled out ("Round 1 includes up to 5 changes. Round 2 includes 3.") Feedback cycles defined ("48-hour turnaround for client feedback or the project may be delayed or additional fees may be incurred") But here's what most people miss Don't work on client notes immediately. Client sends 37 pieces of feedback at 11pm Friday? Producer sends conflicting notes from the CEO? Marketing wants one thing, sales wants another? Stop. Collect everything first. Resolve the conflicts. Get on the phone and discuss it with your client to get alignment. Separate the "have to haves" from the "nice to haves". Then present unified changes. "Based on all feedback received, here are the 8 changes we'll implement. This constitutes revision round 2 of 3." Watch how fast the random requests stop. No extra work that goes unappreciated. No more feelings of being taken advantage of. Communicate before the crisis, prevents the crisis from happening. "Just so you know, we're entering round 2. You have one more included. After that, it's $X per additional round." No surprises. No awkward money conversations. No resentment. Scope creep isn't a them problem. It's a you problem. And that's good news, because that means you are in control. They're not trying to take advantage. They just don't know where the boundaries are because you never drew them. Draw the lines early. Communicate them clearly. Everyone wins. What's your most painful scope creep story? What boundary would've prevented it? Small Business Builders #projectmanagement #clientmanagement #businessgrowth

Last week, I described four design patterns for AI agentic workflows that I believe will drive significant progress: Reflection, Tool use, Planning and Multi-agent collaboration. Instead of having an LLM generate its final output directly, an agentic workflow prompts the LLM multiple times, giving it opportunities to build step by step to higher-quality output. Here, I'd like to discuss Reflection. It's relatively quick to implement, and I've seen it lead to surprising performance gains. You may have had the experience of prompting ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini, receiving unsatisfactory output, delivering critical feedback to help the LLM improve its response, and then getting a better response. What if you automate the step of delivering critical feedback, so the model automatically criticizes its own output and improves its response? This is the crux of Reflection. Take the task of asking an LLM to write code. We can prompt it to generate the desired code directly to carry out some task X. Then, we can prompt it to reflect on its own output, perhaps as follows: Heres code intended for task X: [previously generated code] Check the code carefully for correctness, style, and efficiency, and give constructive criticism for how to improve it. Sometimes this causes the LLM to spot problems and come up with constructive suggestions. Next, we can prompt the LLM with context including (i) the previously generated code and (ii) the constructive feedback, and ask it to use the feedback to rewrite the code. This can lead to a better response. Repeating the criticism/rewrite process might yield further improvements. This self-reflection process allows the LLM to spot gaps and improve its output on a variety of tasks including producing code, writing text, and answering questions. And we can go beyond self-reflection by giving the LLM tools that help evaluate its output; for example, running its code through a few unit tests to check whether it generates correct results on test cases or searching the web to double-check text output. Then it can reflect on any errors it found and come up with ideas for improvement. Further, we can implement Reflection using a multi-agent framework. I've found it convenient to create two agents, one prompted to generate good outputs and the other prompted to give constructive criticism of the first agent's output. The resulting discussion between the two agents leads to improved responses. Reflection is a relatively basic type of agentic workflow, but I've been delighted by how much it improved my applications results. If youre interested in learning more about reflection, I recommend: - Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback, by Madaan et al. (2023) - Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning, by Shinn et al. (2023) - CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing, by Gou et al. (2024) [Original text: https://lnkd.in/g4bTuWtU ]

If You Cant Explain Budgeting Like This, Youre Not Ready for FP&A Interviews. Lets assume I ask you the budget for fuel (petrol/diesel) expenses that you are going to incur next year in 2026. How would you budget using the below techniques: 1. Incremental / Traditional Budgeting You take into account the expenses on fuel you made this year. Assuming that amount is INR 50,000. Considering inflation, fuel price changes, and usage patterns, you estimate a 20% increase. Accordingly, your fuel budget for next year will be INR 60,000 (50,000 + 20%) 2. Zero-Based Budgeting Instead of taking current years expenses, you start from scratch. You estimate how much your car will travel next year. Then factor in expected fuel price and mileage of your vehicle. Based on this, you calculate a reasonable estimate of fuel expenses for next year 3. Activity-Based Budgeting Lets say you use the car only to commute to and from office. For each round trip, your car consumes fuel worth INR 500. Your budgeting would be based on this activity (number of trips taken in a year). If you go to office twice a week, total trips = 52 2 = 104. Hence, your fuel budget = 500 104 = INR 52,000. 4. Flexible Budgeting Your fuel cost depends on how frequently you travel. Instead of one fixed budget, you prepare multiple scenarios. Example: 2 days/week INR 52,000 4 days/week INR 104,000 Your actual budget will depend on actual usage during the year. 5. Rolling (Continuous) Budgeting You dont fix the budget once for the entire year. You keep revising it periodically (monthly/quarterly). Example: if fuel prices increase mid-year or your travel increases, you update the remaining budget accordingly. 6. Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Budgeting Top-Down: You decide a cap (say INR 55,000) and adjust your usage to stay within it Bottom-Up: You calculate expected usage (like ABB/ZBB) and arrive at the number logically 7. Value Proposition Budgeting (using the same example) Instead of focusing only on cost, you evaluate whether the expense creates value. You analyse each type of travel: Office commute - necessary Leisure / unnecessary trips - optional You may reduce or eliminate low-value trips, carpool, or use alternative transport. Hence, your budget is driven by value derived rather than just estimated usage. This way, the same fuel expense can give you very different budgets depending on the approach you use.

, - : . Read the report: https://lnkd.in/ekRmSj_h With this report, we are introducing a simple and scalable way to measure project success. A successful project is one that , as perceived by key stakeholders. This clearly represents a shift for our profession, where beyond execution excellence we also feel accountable for doing anything in our power to improve the impact of our work and the value it generates at large. The implications for project professionals can be summarized in a framework for delivering success: anage Perceptions For a project to be considered successful, the key stakeholders - customers, executives, or others - must perceive that the projects outcomes provide sufficient value relative to the perceived investment of resources. wn Project Success beyond Project Management Success Project professionals need to take any opportunity to move beyond literal mandates and feel accountable for improving outcomes while minimizing waste. elentlessly Reassess Project Parameters Project professionals need to recognize the reality of inevitable and ongoing change, and continuously, in collaboration with stakeholders, reassess the perception of value and adjust plans. xpand Perspective All projects have impacts beyond just the scope of the project itself. Even if we do not control all parameters, we must consider the broader picture and how the project fits within the larger business, goals, or objectives of the enterprise, and ultimately, our world. I believe executives will be excited about this work. It highlights the value project professionals can bring to their organizations and clarifies the vital role they play in driving transformation, delivering business results, and positively impacting the world. The shift in mindset will encourage project professionals to consider the perceptions of all stakeholders- not just the c-suite, but also customers and communities. To deliver more successful projects, business leaders must create environments that empower project professionals. They need to involve them in defining - and continuously reassessing and challenging - project value. Leverage their expertise. Invest in their work. And hold them accountable for contributing to maximize the perception of project value at all phases of the project - beyond excellence in execution. Please read the report, reflect on its findings, and share it broadly. And comment! Project Management Institute #ProjectSuccess #PMI #Leadership #ProjectManagementToday

WEF's Global Risks Report 2026 is out (https://lnkd.in/eaMrdW67).. I put the findings in a 20-year perspective. I mapped 20 years of risk rankings. Two patterns stand out. Both troubling. The headline findings in this report: geoeconomic confrontation is now the #1 risk in the short term, economic risks are spiking, 50% of experts expect a turbulent or stormy outlook over the next two years. But the deeper signal only appears when you track the rankings over time (what I did, see ). - Not overnight. Not mechanically. But persistently. In 20072010, short-term risks were concrete and immediate: asset bubbles, oil shocks, chronic diseases. Fast forward to today. The long-term top risks for 2026 are: extreme weather biodiversity loss misinformation adverse AI outcomes What changed is not that economic risks disappeared. Its that structural risks began to act as crisis amplifiers. Extreme weather didnt replace financial shocks, it reshaped them. Climate risks first entered the short-term top 5 around 2014. By 2020, climate action failure topped the list. Tomorrows risks became todays stress multipliers, and increasingly, direct crisis drivers. The future didnt wait. : , This year, environmental risks dropped sharply in the short-term rankings. More worrying: their severity scores also declined in absolute terms. Yet over the 10-year horizon, environmental risks dominate the top 10. Twenty years of WEF risk data tell the same story: we consistently recognise long-term environmental threats, then consistently deprioritise them when short-term pressures mount. It's not that we don't know. It's that our attention economy is structurally biased toward the urgent over the important. The most interconnected risk for the second year running? Inequality (). It fuels everything else: polarisation, migration, political instability, resistance to climate policy. Perhaps that's where to start: - , - . #GlobalRisks #WEF #ClimateChange #Sustainability #SystemChange

Should you try Googles famous 20% time experiment to encourage innovation? We tried this at Duolingo years ago. It didnt work. It wasnt enough time for people to start meaningful projects, and very few people took advantage of it because the framework was pretty vague. I knew there had to be other ways to drive innovation at the company. So, here are 3 other initiatives weve tried, what weve learned from each, and what we're going to try next. Innovation Awards: Annual recognition for those who move the needle with boundary-pushing projects. The upside: These awards make our commitment to innovation clear, and offer a well-deserved incentive to those who have done remarkable work. The downside: Its given to individuals, but we want to incentivize team work. Whats more, its not necessarily a framework for coming up with the next big thing. Hackathon: This is a good framework, and lots of companies do it. Everyone (not just engineers) can take two days to collaborate on and present anything that excites them, as long as it advances our mission or addresses a key business need. The upside: Some of our biggest features grew out of hackathon projects, from the Duolingo English Test (born at our first hackathon in 2013) to our avatar builder. The downside: Other than the time/resource constraint, projects rarely align with our current priorities. The ones that take off hit the elusive combo of right time + a problem that no other team could tackle. Special Projects: Knowing that ideal equation, we started a new program for fostering innovation, playfully dubbed DARPA (Duolingo Advanced Research Project Agency). The idea: anyone can pitch an idea at any time. If they get consensus on it and if its not in the purview of another team, a cross-functional group is formed to bring the project to fruition. The most creative work tends to happen when a problem is not in the clear purview of a particular team; this program creates a path for bringing these kinds of interdisciplinary ideas to life. Our Duo and Lily mascot suits (featured often on our social accounts) came from this, as did our Duo plushie and the merch store. (And if this photo doesn't show why we needed to innovate for new suits, I don't know what will!) The biggest challenge: figuring out how to transition ownership of a successful project after the strike teams work is done. Whats next? Were working on a program that proactively identifies big picture, unassigned problems that we havent figured out yet and then incentivizes people to create proposals for solving them. How that will work is still to be determined, but we know there is a lot of fertile ground for it to take root. How does your company create an environment of creativity that encourages true innovation? I'm interested to hear what's worked for you, so please feel free to share in the comments! #duolingo #innovation #hackathon #creativity #bigideas

60 UX Strategy Methods And Activities (Figma) (https://lnkd.in/eCDU-vhR), a large repository of UX methods, templates and activities for ideation sessions and product sprints, from storyboards and brainwriting to 6 thinking hats, journey mapping and concept testing. Neatly put together in one single place by fine folks at Merck. The team has also put together a very thorough overview of their UX Strategy Kit (https://lnkd.in/ek5dEYn4), broken down by categories for strategy, observation, ideation and warm-up, along with detailed video walkthroughs, examples and step-by-step guides. Frankly, most of these methods are unfamiliar to me. And by no means is the point to actually study and apply all of them. What works for you works for you. To strategize, I rely on How Might We but also think about metrics that should be moved once we implement some features or refine some user flows. For event storming and brainstorming, I tend to rely on Bonos 6 thinking hats to align brainstorming, and (of course) journey mapping. For ideation, I love using storyboards to jump right into the users success story, but would also use card sorting with cut-out paper cards to understand users mental model. And for almost every project, Id run concept testing with tree testing or Kano model, or low-fidelity/paper prototyping to understand if we are on the right track. Once you sprinkle a bit of critical thinking, early user testing and strategic planning across the design work, you gain confidence that you are moving in the right direction. And really thats all you need. A few of my personal bookmarks with UX methods and activities: UX Tools For Better Thinking, by Adam Amran https://untools.co/ Playbook For Universal Design (+ PDF/Powerpoint templates) https://lnkd.in/ernris4g UX Methods & Projects, by Vernon Fowler https://lnkd.in/eAHaiaSm 18F Method Cards https://methods.18f.gov/ Hyperisland UX Methods Resource Kit https://lnkd.in/eDTaci7T How To Design Better UX Workshops, by Slava Shestopalov https://lnkd.in/edxqCC-n How To Run UX Workshops With Users, by yours truly https://lnkd.in/ejm7_TsS Happy designing, everyone I hope youll find these guides and resources helpful to get started. Just dont feel like you have to try out all of them. It might be much more worthwhile to get early feedback from stakeholders and end users, even if your work isnt really good enough. Good luck! #ux #design

Just created this comprehensive Pandas cheatsheet that I wish I had when I started myjourney! After seeing fellow practitioners struggle with the same pandas operations, I decided to create a simple yet powerful reference guide: "9 Must-Know Pandas Operations for Working with Data" This is - Focused on real-world use cases, not just syntax Includes time-saving tips I learned the hard way Covers both basic and advanced features Clean, visual layout for quick reference Key sections include: - Data Import/Export tricks - Efficient data selection methods - Statistical operations - Time series handling - String manipulation - Advanced features you might not know about Perfect for: Data Professionals (Data Engineers, Data Scientists, ML Engineer, AI Engineers, and Data Analysts) Tech Professionals working with Data Here are a few other commands that can help you with advanced operations - 1. - .() for combining DataFrames - vs operations - .() for column renaming - ._() and ._() 2. - ._() for percentage changes - .(), .() for cumulative operations - .() for ranking values 3. - ._() for converting to datetime - More datetime accessors like .., .. - Business day operations with . 4. - .() and .() for binning - ._() for one-hot encoding - Window functions beyond .() - Cross-tabulation with .() 5. - () method - .() and .() - .() for limiting values 6. - MultiIndex operations - Index alignment - Cross-section selection with .() Have I overlooked anything? Please share your thoughtsyour insights are priceless to me.