All Cantilever projects (both internal and client-facing) have a designated Strategist and Project Manager. The Strategist is the “Directly Responsible Individual” of the project. The buck stops with them, and therefore, they have control over how they want to do things. Often, a strategist will be in a leadership role, but anyone at the company can be a strategist, even an outside consultant. The PM is not responsible for setting the vision for the project, but is responsible for ensuring that the team works according to our methodology. The PM keeps everyone playing by the same rules.

When it comes to client work, the problem we solve best is that their website is not delivering the results they need. Sub-versions of that problem are things like:

The Strategist’s job is to make sure this problem is crystal clear, and that the context and reason is also clear. They determine the goals of the project and are responsible for taking the problem to the team to solve. They can bring their own ideas too, but it is not their job to solve the problem (designing the website, creating the spreadsheet, writing the code, etc).

The Strategist hands off clarified problems to the team, usually in the form of Asana todos. A given project may contain one overall problem, or many smaller ones. On a large project, the “problems” are usually just pieces of work that we commonly need to do. On an ongoing website support project, the problems will be individual things that need addressing. The solution might be to write new code, use a plugin, or a third-party service. The strategist doesn’t decide that, the team does.

The PM is in the middle of it all, monitoring this process, and ensuring that it is progressing properly. The PM makes sure that we are meeting our commitments, and takes care of all the logistics required to run the project successfully. The PM should be intimately aware of all the developments taking place on their projects and regularly reports back to the client and strategist.