Human Made · 2018 to 2022 · PM Team Lead, then PM Discipline Lead
Context
Human Made is a global, fully remote WordPress agency. I led the project management discipline globally and was the senior leader for the APAC region.
The challenge
The region was growing fast across a 6.5 hour time zone spread, 12 ethnic backgrounds and at least seven language groups. For a quarter of that period there was no in-region engineering management. Growth like that breaks informal ways of working, and the ones that remain end up in one person’s head.
What I did
- Built the performance and progression frameworks for the PM cohort, benchmarked against the Radford framework.
- Ran PM hiring for two years, including the process and resources behind it.
- Wrote the playbooks and delivery standards used across five regional teams.
- Helped turn the company values into five dimensions with observable behaviours, used as a scoring rubric in quarterly and peer review.
- Took over the regional professional services calls and redesigned them so people contributed rather than reported status.
The outcome
- The APAC team grew from 10 to 20 contributors in twelve months, with 85% retention in PM hiring.
- APAC delivered close to 43% of company revenue in FY2021/22, running 29% above target.
- Regional calls ran at over 60% weekly attendance from the engineering contingent.
- Three of the people I managed now run delivery functions. One came up through the practice I built, years after I left. A fourth, whom I hired without agency or platform experience, is now a Chief Operating Officer.
She believes in her team, builds them up and coaches them for success: it’s rare to find a people manager who is so invested in the success of their team.
Siobhan McKeown, former COO, Human Made