I clocked in like any other morning.
First thing I noticed was a few profiles gone dark in the workspace. Deactivated. Just like that. I knew layoffs were coming. The company had been struggling with delivery, and the signs were there. But knowing something is coming and actually seeing it happen are two different things. It hit different that morning.
I sat with it for a second, then got back to work. I was leading the QA team at the time, and I use “leading” loosely. We were a small, inexperienced crew. I was waiting for the PM to drop the day’s testing tasks in the chat.
The tasks never came. The PM was gone too.
A little while later, the co-founder (tech lead) messaged me.
He walked me through what happened, who was let go, what the team looked like now. Then he asked if I could run the standups for a week or so while they figured things out. Just temporarily.
Sure, I said. No problem.
Then, almost like an afterthought, he asked the real question.
What if you just take over? Like, as PM?
My first thought, honestly? What if it doesn’t turn out good? What then? That was it. Not excitement, not confidence. Just that. We were already down to a skeleton team. The last thing anyone needed was a QA guy fumbling through a role he’d never done before.
I wasn’t a project manager. I had no certification, no formal training, no real framework in my head beyond what I’d absorbed standing next to the team for months. I was a QA lead, and even that title was a stretch given how new I was to it.
But he didn’t give me the chance to spiral. He backed me up, talked me through it, told me he’d be around.
So I said yes.
Later that same day, the founder reached out and officially welcomed me as the new Project Manager.
I stared at the screen for a moment. Then I thought, okay. So now what?
That first week was a lot.
I announced it in the standup myself. Something like “I’ll be running these going forward, and I may be stepping into the PM role full time.” No fanfare. The team took it fine. I had always been around, always been in the loop on QA updates, so it wasn’t exactly a shock. Just a new label on a familiar face.
But behind the scenes it was a completely different story.
I was still doing QA. The whole QA team had been part of the layoffs, so that work didn’t disappear, it just landed entirely on me. On top of that I was learning on the fly how to run standups properly, starting to understand what a PM actually owns, how to run sprint planning, how to think about blockers differently than I did as a tester.
The co-founder (tech lead) guided a lot. I’m not going to pretend I figured it all out alone. He taught me how to read the board, how to plan a sprint, how to actually run a standup that’s worth everyone’s time. The founder, who is himself a certified Scrum Master, was deeply involved and patient.
Still. At some point every day, it was just me and the screen and a list of things that needed to get done.
That was about one year ago now.
I’m still at the same company, still running the same product, a business communication platform with a growing set of AI features. The team has grown, the product has grown, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, so have I.
If I’m being honest about what I actually learned, it comes down to a few things.
You don’t get ready and then step up. It’s the other way around. There was no moment where I felt fully prepared before saying yes. The preparation came after, through the stumbles, through the late nights juggling QA and PM work alone, through the sprints that went sideways, through learning to give feedback I didn’t know how to give yet. Waiting to feel ready would’ve meant never going.
The other thing is that someone believing in you before you believe in yourself is genuinely underrated. I didn’t have a PMP. I still don’t. I had a co-founder who said he thought I could do it, and he said it with enough conviction that I borrowed some of it until I built my own. Real confidence, for me, was borrowed first and earned second.
And then there’s the ambiguity thing, which nobody really prepares you for. There’s no playbook. No one hands you a document called “here’s how we do PM at this company.” There was a board, a team, a product that needed to ship, and a blank page where my role was supposed to be. You figure it out as you go, you make calls you’re not totally sure about, and you communicate with more confidence than you feel. That part, I think, is the actual job. The tools and frameworks you can pick up in a few weeks. The ambiguity tolerance takes longer.
I’m writing this mostly for the people sitting somewhere in the middle of their career, in a role that doesn’t fully reflect what they’re capable of. A QA lead, a coordinator, a junior dev who’s been quietly picking things up for months.
If someone asks you to step up and your first thought is what if I’m not good enough, that’s normal. That’s just what it feels like.
Say yes anyway. The rest comes.
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