Do We Need To Oversell a Project?
A Project Manager's Dilemma.
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
This story starts with an expectedly boring meeting with the business, where they would come up with requirements for a brand-new product and short deadlines. What else is new, right? However, an interesting fact emerged: the pitch for the new product sparked some intriguing ideas. One of these ideas, if executed correctly, could potentially benefit the company greatly, and these requirements could serve as the first building block of something much bigger.
During the pitch, I started to visualize how to set things in motion in my mind, while my senior manager was simultaneously selling the same vision to the business. When I say “selling,” I mean he was pitching that idea hard—like it was the best chocolate cake in the world, and we were living in a place that had never tasted cocoa-derived products. He made bold claims that, to me, bordered on overselling. Still, it got me wondering: how much of a “salesperson” do we need to be as managers?
Some time ago I have wrote an article which covered a specific type of Project Manager, who was very focused on the commercial or selling part of the work. Below the article for satisfying your curiosity.
Going back to the story…
Due to my way of doing things, I stay very close to software development teams and strive to understand the specifics of their requests and the challenges they face in the project. Since I consider myself pragmatic, I avoid proposing solutions that could face serious hurdles when put into motion. I also try to steer clear of adding options to the discussion when we lack enough information or have unanswered questions about execution. This might be seen as a safe approach—and perhaps a smart course of action—but if we all stick to boring sales pitches, we end up with boring products, right? The truth is, we’ll never have the full picture perfectly laid out in front of us, and sometimes we just need to seize the political momentum.
This situation shows why it’s important to have a team with a diverse, complementary set of skills. If we look closer, a team isn’t just the sum of all its capabilities combined—it’s really about the range of skills. Two experts in making bread won’t make the bread twice as good. But pair one expert bread maker with another who knows how to sell freshly baked bread across town, and the entire endeavor becomes far more successful. It’s that range that truly makes an impact.
So the question is: Do we need to oversell a project? What’s clear is that all managers need the ability to showcase the quality of our teams, our products, and our departments to anyone who might turn to us for guidance. Indeed, some project managers—true salespeople by nature—go after clients and close contracts as part of their job description. But not all managers should be chasing new clients. The point is that every manager needs some degree of skill to pitch anything within their scope. Moreover, a manager leads a team composed of a diverse range of skills and abilities—it’s this range that generates most of the impact. If this range enables our team to take a product to new heights, we might need to oversell just enough to get the project off the ground.
Because I see myself as pragmatic, I tend to be someone who makes stuff happen. If someone asks me to launch a project to go to the moon, I’ll ensure we have a space rocket—or the people, know-how, and resources to build one. If not, I’ll ask Mr. Musk when his Starship is ready for hire, since I only see him doing wild things in the White House and calling everyone back to the office these days. My point is that to make “stuff happen”, we need to stay grounded in reality and be laser-focused on how things progress. However, if you want someone to sponsor a trip to the moon, you’ve got to sell a vision. My senior manager—the one overselling a company-wide solution—would probably be the perfect person to pitch a moon ride, while I’d be the grumpy guy asking when my Raptor engines are getting delivered.
Selling ideas is a critical part of any manager’s job description. Being able to pitch these ideas effectively is key to advancing any strategy or launching new projects. The bigger the idea, the more compelling the pitch needs to be. Some might think that presenting a business plan with strong, well-supported numbers guarantees a “yes”—and that’s true to an extent. However, to turn that business plan into reality, we need to create a spark; otherwise, everything else will take higher priority, and the idea will never get off the ground. The more ambitious the idea, the bigger the spark required. The team relies on us to bring them exciting projects, challenging new features, and keep the momentum going smoothly. In the end, it all on us.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur
I am in hardware development, and therefore my experiences might not relate to software, but I want to share it anyhow. I have experienced many times, that engineering had a perfect solution and successfully sold it to management. However, sales did not understand it and did not market the new solution. As a consequence, customer did not recognize the existence, never tried and the product got scrapped after some time, because of no success. So, if marketing plays a vital role in the business, one need to sell to sales as well.