Read time: 5 minutes

Hey Subscriber First Name,

Quick one this week. One idea, one weekly nudge, and something I've been keeping an eye on that I think is worth sharing.

Let me start with a conversation I had last week.

A friend of mine, a sharp and experienced PM, messaged me out of the blue. He said, "I don't know what's happened. Six weeks ago I was flying on this project. Now I can't get anyone to reply to an email. Including myself."

I laughed. Not at him. At the memory of being exactly there. More times than I'd like to admit.

Because here's the thing nobody warns you about when you start a project: the most dangerous moment isn't the kick-off, and it isn't the deadline. It's the middle.

The kick-off is easy. Everyone's in the room. The deck's fresh. The sponsor says "let's make this happen" and you believe it.

The deadline is easy too, in its own horrible way. You can see the wall. Adrenaline does the rest.

But the middle? The middle is where projects quietly stop moving.

Not because of a disaster. Because of drift. The novelty wears off. The meetings start repeating themselves. The risk log looks the same as it did three weeks ago. Your sponsor is paying attention to something shinier. Your team has stopped asking questions because they're tired. And you, the PM, realise you've been pushing the same status update around for a fortnight wondering why nothing is landing.

That's when most projects take their first real wound. And nobody notices, because nothing dramatic is happening. That's the whole problem.

I used to think the fix was to push harder. Longer hours, tighter tracking, more governance. It isn't. Pushing harder in the middle just burns everyone out faster. It's a treadmill, not a lever.

The fix is simpler. And slightly annoying, because it sounds too small to work.

You need one visible win every single week.

Not a milestone. Milestones are months apart and too big to lean on. I mean a tiny, concrete, "look, this moved" moment. A stuck decision, unstuck. A red risk, turned amber. A document everyone was avoiding, finally signed. A conversation that should have happened weeks ago, finally had.

Then you show it. Not in a RAG report. In a sentence. To your team, to your sponsor, to yourself. "This week, we got this one thing over the line."

It sounds trivial. It isn't.

Research by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile asked nearly 700 managers what drives their teams most. Only 5% picked progress in the work. The rest put their money on recognition, bonuses, motivational speeches. Then Amabile's team studied the teams themselves, 12,000 diary entries from real employees, and found the opposite: nothing moves people more than the feeling of making progress in work that matters. Ninety-five percent of managers are wrong about their own teams.

A project in the middle isn't starving for effort. It's starving for evidence that the effort is working.

So if your project is in the middle right now, and something in this email is making you nod a little too hard, here's the honest truth: you don't need a new plan. You don't need a re-baseline. You don't need a heroic sprint.

You need one small, visible win. This week. Then another one next week. Then another.

That's how you get through the middle. Not by pushing harder. By making progress impossible to miss.

MAKING IT HAPPEN: Your Weekly Strategy

Before Friday, find one thing on your project that has been stuck, sitting in the "to do later" pile, or quietly slipping. Move it one inch forward. Just one. Then tell someone. Your team, your sponsor, a group chat, doesn't matter. The act of naming the win is half the point. Do it again next week. And the week after. Six weeks from now you'll look back and realise the middle never arrived, because you refused to let the project stop moving.

TREND I'M WATCHING: Personal AI

Something quiet is happening underneath the noise about ChatGPT and the big AI players, and I think it's worth paying attention to.

For the last two years, using AI has meant renting it. You log into someone else's platform, type into their box, and trust that whatever you type is handled sensibly on the other side. For most people, that's been fine.

But the ground is shifting.

We're now at the point where genuinely capable AI models can run on a normal laptop. Some can run on a phone. No cloud. No subscription. No account. No data leaving the device in your hand. Just the model, sitting there, ready when you need it.

For years, the story of AI has been the big players and the rest of us. A handful of companies with the compute, the models, and the gatekeeping power. Everyone else renting access on their terms.

Imagine that flipping. Imagine every person with a phone carrying an assistant that belongs to them. Not locked behind a login. Not metered. Not watching. Just theirs.

For anyone working in regulated industries, client-confidential work, or anywhere sensitive information can't be pasted into a public chatbot, this quietly changes the game. It's not fully there yet. The models are smaller. The setup is still a bit fiddly. But the direction is unmistakable.

The big players won't own this forever. And that's a good thing.

I'll share what I learn as I go. For now, file it under "worth knowing this is coming."

TWO NEW CHEAT SHEETS THIS WEEK

Two fresh one-pagers have landed in the Making It Happen drive. Both free. Save them, share them, use them.

1. The OPEN Framework: Win the room, not the argument. A few weeks ago I wrote about how the best PMs never disagree first. They keep the door open. I've now turned that into a one-page cheat sheet you can keep next to your laptop: Open with what you both want, Pause and acknowledge, Explore with questions, Navigate with suggestions. Four steps, one page, every difficult conversation.

2. The AI-Era PM Playbook: Build the people skills AI can't replace. AI will keep eating the admin. It won't eat the conversations. This sheet gives you the 3C Monday Check-In: three questions, three minutes, every Monday. Ask your team "how are we really doing?". Ask yourself "what tension am I avoiding?". Ask your sponsor "are we still solving the right problem?". Three reps a week. The one thing AI will never automate is the person people trust when it gets hard.

Download both here.

If this landed with you, forward it to someone who's stuck in the middle of something and doesn't quite know why. That's how this community grows, one honest conversation at a time.

bilaljamil.com | Newsletter archive | Hit reply and tell me what you're stuck on, I read every one.

Take care and speak soon, 

Bilal