What Makes a Great Project Manager in 2026

In 2026, the PMs who stand out aren’t the ones with the most certifications or the slickest AI workflows. What sets them apart is how they lead people.

Being a great project manager has never been easy. But in 2026, the role is more demanding than ever. When it comes to digital project management, there’s the accelerated technological change, people are more autonomous in their roles because of AI, the products are more complex, and there are higher, more strategic expectations from businesses. 

So what separates a good project manager from a great one today? According to two experienced leaders, it has less to do with tools, frameworks, or certifications than most people think.

We explored this question with Yann Thézénas, Senior Digital Projects Expert at FIBA, who joined us on Delivered to share his experience from more than a decade of managing projects across telecom, logistics, SaaS, and international sport. More recently, he led the largest project of his career: a two-and-a-half-year transformation of FIBA’s global digital ecosystem, delivered against the immovable deadline of the Paris 2024 Olympics.

We also spoke to Martina Šnajder, Agile Lead at Infinum, who has spent more than a decade leading Agile teams across healthcare, banking, and automotive. Alongside her client work, Martina has also led Agile and project management education initiatives through workshops, mentoring, and guest lectures.

The project management skill nobody puts on their resume

Yann Thézénas started his career as an engineer. During an internship, a project director handed him ownership of the project. What stuck with him wasn’t the technical execution itself, but the broader experience of solving a business problem from beginning to end.

“When I was a developer, I received technical specifications, implemented them, and that was the end of the story,” said Yann on Delivered. “When I led a project by myself, I found great satisfaction in understanding the business requirements, the pain points, and then seeing them turn into something real through delivery.”

Martina’s career followed a similar path. She was a frontend engineer before she discovered her passion for Agile. That transition from builder to coordinator gave both Yann and Martina something difficult to teach: fluency in both technical and business language. They can translate technical constraints into business decisions, and business goals into something engineers can build.

It also gives them the confidence to challenge assumptions, spot risks early, and explain complex decisions without losing the room. But the most important thing they carried into project management wasn’t technical at all. It was the instinct to put the team first.

Leadership qualities every great project manager needs

Adaptation

“The world evolves fast. You always need to adapt your techniques, always handle new technology, and the new way of working. Now we have to learn how to work with AI,” Yann explains. But adaptability is about more than keeping up with tools. Great project managers know how to read situations, teams, and contexts. They borrow practices from different industries, adjust their communication style, and avoid applying frameworks rigidly when reality doesn’t fit the process.

Emotional intelligence over authority

Project managers lead without direct authority. Their influence comes from understanding people, not controlling them. “Some people need clear directions, others need freedom in their creativity. Some like to be rewarded, others prefer working in the shadow,” says Yann.

The best PMs learn how individual people work and adjust accordingly. They know when to push, when to step back, and how to create an environment where people want to do great work. Martina adds another important dimension: creating psychological safety.

Transparent communication

As a PM, you often get the chance to choose your team, build trust gradually, and establish ways of working over time. That’s rarely true for stakeholders. They enter the project with competing priorities, different definitions of success, and their own anxieties about what the project means for them.

The answer isn’t to manage them into submission. It’s about involving them early and communicating consistently. “Embark them in the adventure with you, and over-communicate during the project so they feel included,” explains Yann.

Great project managers create visibility, surface trade-offs early, and make stakeholders feel like they’re part of the process, rather than observers reacting from the outside.

Bridging the gap between technical and non-technical teams

Having an engineering background gives both Yann and Martina an advantage. They can challenge estimates, recognize unnecessary complexity, and explain technical limitations in terms that stakeholders understand.

That ability to operate comfortably in both worlds matters more than ever on modern digital projects, where technical decisions often carry strategic business consequences.

Servant leadership

For both Yann and Martina, the best project managers are servant leaders. That means holding the vision and protecting the project goals while creating the conditions for other people to do their best work. The role is less about control and more about enabling momentum.

For Martina, servant leadership often looks invisible from the outside. “It’s a shift from ‘I manage the work’ to ‘I manage the conditions for the work,” she explains.

That means removing blockers before the team even has to ask, shielding people from unnecessary noise, and focusing on creating clarity.

Project management skills AI can’t replace

AI is changing the project management role, but not in the way many people fear. “The one thing AI won’t be able to replace is people management, and that’s the core of our role,” says Yann.

What AI can handle

AI can be genuinely useful for project managers, from summarizing meeting notes, drafting status reports, and suggesting action points, to helping with creating, maintaining, and analyzing backlogs, and generating risk registers.

There are many cognitively heavy tasks that AI can take off project managers’ plates. It’s really good at turning messy input into structured output, exactly the kind of work that eats into the hours a PM should be spending on people.

What stays human

Projects are delivered by people. And understanding people is the one skill that AI can’t replicate.

The most valuable project management skills remain the hardest to automate: reading the room during difficult conversations, managing expectations, knowing when to escalate, and recognizing when silence says more than another meeting ever could.

Why knowing what not to build matters more than what you build

Another underrated skill that every great project manager needs is knowing what not to build. Scope creep is one of the main reasons why projects fail. Not dramatically, but quietly, one reasonable request at a time. The PM’s job is to keep an eye on scope, push back on nice-to-haves, and make sure the goal stays in focus.

As Martina puts it: “A backlog full of good user stories is useless if no one’s challenged whether half of them should even exist.”

In fixed-budget or fixed-deadline projects, every yes to something is a no to something else. Great PMs make sure those tradeoffs are visible, and that the decisions around them are grounded in facts.

For more valuable project management insights, listen to our full conversation with Yann. And if you have a digital product idea and need a team that brings this kind of leadership to the project, let’s talk.

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