Honestly, I had no idea what a PM was when I started doing this job.
I Wasn’t Even a PM at First
When I joined a global company, my title was Bridge Software — a role that connected technical communication between headquarters and local teams. Then one day, without much fanfare, the word “PM” quietly appeared on my business card.
Nobody explained it to me. No formal transition, no training. Projects just started landing on my desk, and somehow they were mine to manage.
“PM? That’s just… scheduling meetings and tracking timelines, right?”
That’s genuinely what I thought back then.
No Mentor, No Map
The hardest part wasn’t the work itself. It was that nobody showed me how.
I wasn’t a developer. Not a designer. Not a QA engineer. I was a PM — and I had no idea what “doing PM well” even looked like. There was no benchmark, no senior to shadow, no one to tell me if I was on the right track.
- How do you figure out what stakeholders actually want?
- How do you mediate between dev teams and business teams?
- How do you report schedule delays without everything blowing up?
I had to figure it all out by bumping into walls. Every single time.
Honestly? There were moments I seriously wanted to quit. Not just once or twice — more than I’d like to admit.
Three Years Later
Somehow, I held on. Three years have passed. Last year, I went for the PMP certification and passed.
But I’m not going to pretend I’ve figured it all out. I still struggle. I still make mistakes. Theory and practice are always different in this job — that gap never fully closes.
Some things get easier with time. Some things stay hard no matter how long you’ve been doing it. I think that’s just the nature of PM work.
What has changed is this:
I actually want to keep doing this.
That feeling of wanting to run away has slowly turned into wanting to keep showing up and figuring it out.
Why I’m Starting This Blog
When I looked for PM resources in Korean, I kept running into the same problem: either there wasn’t much, or what existed was too theoretical, or it was written from the perspective of someone who’d already figured everything out.
I wanted to write for people who feel as lost as I used to.
The me who didn’t know what a PM was. The me who learned everything alone, without a mentor. The me who wanted to quit.
And the me now — three years in, still learning, still sometimes confused.
If you’re reading this and any of that sounds familiar, I want you to know: there’s someone here who gets it. I hope that’s worth something.
What I’ll Be Writing About
📚 PM Fundamentals — PMBOK concepts, especially the parts I found confusing
📄 Documentation — Project Charters, WBS, Risk Registers, Status Reports
👥 Team Management — Kickoff meetings, conflict resolution, motivation
🤝 Stakeholders — Stakeholder analysis, handling difficult clients
I’ll also tag each post with PDU info. You can track accumulated hours on the PDU Tracker page.
If you’re going through the same questions — glad you’re here. Let’s figure it out together. 💪