AI is changing how software gets built, but does that mean technical program managers (TPMs) and engineering managers should become one role? Not so fast. As engineering teams move faster with AI, the need to manage dependencies, anticipate risks, and keep cross-functional teams aligned isn't disappearing. It's evolving.

In this episode, host Galen Low sits down with Satish Menon, a technical program management and engineering operations leader with experience at Google, Dell, and other major software companies. Together, they explore what technical fluency really means for TPMs, how AI is shifting the value of program management, and why the future of the role depends less on tracking work and more on solving problems, earning trust, and orchestrating delivery at scale.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
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• Check out this episode’s sponsor: Fingerprint
• Connect with Satish on LinkedIn

AI search is changing discovery, but the playbook isn’t about finding a magic prompt, tag, or shortcut. Matt Slater, founder of Receipts, explains why AEO and GEO still depend on fundamentals: knowing who your brand is for, publishing clear first-party information, and building enough real-world credibility for third-party sources to corroborate what you say about yourself.

For project professionals, that shift matters. Stakeholders may want immediate visibility in ChatGPT or Claude, but sustainable results come from consistent, integrated work across brand, content, reputation, and search—not hacks that could disappear with the next update. And as zero-click searches grow, success may increasingly look less like “more traffic” and more like better-informed prospects arriving ready to act.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
• Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
• Check out this episode’s sponsor: Fingerprint
• Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
• Visit Receipts

AI’s biggest opportunity in professional services may not be replacing expertise—it’s removing the operational drag that keeps experts from using it. In this conversation, Projectworks CEO Mark Orttung explores how AI can take on the neglected or repetitive work around proposals, resource planning, timesheets, invoicing, and forecasting while keeping human judgment firmly in the loop.

The bigger shift is moving beyond using AI for isolated tasks and rethinking entire business processes around it. For consulting firms, that means connecting the journey from winning work to staffing it, delivering it profitably, and getting paid—with better data and fewer administrative handoffs along the way.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
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• Connect with Mark on LinkedIn
• Visit Projectworks

Strategic initiatives rarely stall because teams aren’t working hard enough. More often, the information leaders need to make timely decisions is scattered across Jira, Asana, Slack, spreadsheets, meetings, and everything in between. By the time a risk becomes visible at the executive level, the opportunity to address it early may already be gone.

Galen Low sits down with Maria Delgado Oliveros, founder of glidiffy and former program management leader at Uber, Hexagon PPM, and Chime, to unpack what makes strategic initiatives different from ordinary projects—and why better visibility can transform the relationship between program managers and executive sponsors. They explore how PMs can spend less time chasing updates and more time understanding dependencies, surfacing risks, making trade-offs, and becoming trusted operational partners.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
• Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
• Check out this episode’s sponsor: Fingerprint
• Connect with Maria on LinkedIn
• Check out glidiffy

Change is no longer something organizations can neatly package into a transformation initiative. It’s constant—and the real challenge is keeping strategy, decisions, and execution connected while everything around the organization keeps moving.

Galen Low sits down with Denise Jarvie, Managing Director of Agile Alliance and Director of Agile Community at PMI, to explore what it takes to build change readiness as an organization-wide capability. They dig into why strategic intent gets lost on its way to delivery teams, how leaders can move decision-making closer to the work without creating chaos, and why AI is making human judgment—not just technical execution—an increasingly valuable skill.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
• Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
• Connect with Denise on LinkedIn
• Check out Project Management Institute (PMI) and Agile Alliance

AI is changing more than how work gets done—it’s changing who gets to make decisions in the first place. And that makes role clarity, decision rights, and organizational design much harder to leave implicit.

In this episode, Galen Low talks with Cassie Solomon about why RACI still matters in the age of AI, how it can evolve from a documentation tool into a design tool, and what leaders need to rethink as AI agents take on more work, more judgment, and in some cases, more authority.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
• Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
• Connect with Cassie on LinkedIn
• Check out The New Group Consulting and Cassie’s book — Leading Successful Change: 8 Keys to Making Change Work
• Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence

For many project professionals, the job title that once felt like a marker of progress can eventually start to feel like a box. And with AI disruption, shifting responsibilities, and increasingly blurry career paths, figuring out what comes next means looking beyond the label on your LinkedIn profile.

Galen Low sits down with career coach and former project professional James Compton to unpack “career dysmorphia”: the disconnect between a career that looks successful on paper and one that feels draining, flat, or directionless in practice. They explore how to recognize when your professional identity has become too tied to your title, create space to rethink what actually energizes you, and use disruption as an opportunity to rediscover the value and purpose underneath the role.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
• Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
• Connect with James on LinkedIn
• Check out Limitless Leading and The Career Dysmorphia Dossier

When margins get tight, reducing headcount can look like the fastest route to a healthier balance sheet. But in professional services, there’s a catch: your people aren’t just a cost—they’re a big part of what clients are paying for. Cut too deeply, and the short-term savings can quickly turn into overloaded teams, weaker client service, unwanted attrition, and eventually, the cost of hiring people back.

In this episode, Michael Gold and James Leigh explore another path: getting more value from the people you already have. They unpack what it means to “activate” human potential, why AI adoption needs more than a stack of new tools, and how organizations can rethink work around people’s actual strengths instead of forcing everyone into the same job-shaped box. The result is a different way of thinking about efficiency—one that asks how you can grow capability before assuming you need to shrink the team.

Resources from this episode:

• Join the Digital Project Manager Community
• Subscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcasts
• Connect with Michael and James on LinkedIn
• Check out Aria, Gold Strategic Delivery, Vanberra, and Kintara