What Makes a Truly Professional Project Manager? Insights from an Alibaba Expert

What defines a truly professional and excellent project manager (PM) is a challenging question. While PMs often appear to focus on organization, communication, coordination, scheduling meetings, arranging meals, and weekly reports, this view is superficial.

To examine a PM’s abilities more deeply and objectively, senior technical expert Yi Lang from Alibaba shares his perspective.

Project management is a normal practice in business organizations, especially those with strong goal orientation, which rely on PMs to break down departmental walls, quickly mobilize internal resources, and achieve staged results set by management. A project is a temporary effort to deliver a unique product or service.

Every professional PM understands that a project’s purpose is to end. The kickoff aims at closing the project; the goal is to know when the project is complete and how to exit it. When a business unit fails to define clear appointment mechanisms and exit conditions, PMs cannot articulate the results they are responsible for, reflecting insufficient goal direction from leadership.

Letting professionals handle professional work, PMs play a critical role in overall efficiency and outcomes. Studies show that in medium‑to‑large projects, 20‑30 % of time is spent on communication, and in highly bureaucratic organizations this can reach 40 %. Communication includes planning, reviews, discussions, reporting, and summarizing. Effective organization, risk identification, conflict resolution, consensus building, and morale boosting all depend on a PM’s professional capability.

A PM’s personal ability is vital for operational efficiency and final results. Many technical interviewers summarize PMs as having strong communication and collaboration skills, often comparing them horizontally with technical leaders. PMs assume many responsibilities that supervisors would normally hold, leading virtual teams that involve multiple “bosses,” which is more challenging than managing a physical team.

Professional PM performance requires the accumulation of many specialized skills. Effective organization, risk identification, conflict resolution, consensus building, and morale boosting each demand dedicated expertise.

Risk identification, for example, may involve technical or business risk, requiring deep industry experience, or organizational risk, requiring stakeholder identification and work‑breakdown‑structure analysis. Achieving true consensus is not merely compromising; it requires first‑principles thinking and strong negotiation to reach win‑win outcomes. Internal organizational change projects are often more demanding than large‑scale sales events.

The PM model can also create operational loopholes that require management intervention. In some large companies, cost awareness is weak; projects receive abundant resources without separate cost estimates, leading PMs to over‑invest resources in pursuit of “success.”

Project operations and results are sometimes reflected by numerous posters and emails, which do not necessarily indicate a truly large or successful project. Management must recognize this and provide appropriate support. Many employees joke about switching to product or HR roles, highlighting the current chaos in job transitions and the lack of proper assessment of professional capabilities.

In conclusion, PMs are both highly professional and in high demand; their contributions are often under‑recognized, and the community should work together to amplify their voice.