Project Manager

How to hire a Project Manager

Before you write the job posting, settle three questions. They determine which profile you really need and help you avoid the most common scope mistakes at German SMBs. The Project Manager is often the first hire in delivery governance after the function leads, and the hire shapes the company’s project practice for the long run.

Question 1: Project Manager, Scrum Master or programme lead? The three roles partly overlap but are not equivalent. The Scrum Master works closely on a single team and on the agile process (stand-ups, retrospectives, removing impediments, velocity steering). The Project Manager carries the delivery responsibility across several teams and functions, with budget, risks, stakeholder management and escalation as the core of the role. The programme lead steers a portfolio of several projects and often leads several Project Managers; the role is justified at a minimum of 5-7 parallel projects or from programmes over 2 M€. Mixing the three in one ad attracts poorly fitting applications and costs time. Specify the function already in the title: Projektmanager:in (m/w/d), not a multi-purpose profile of PM and agile coach, which says nothing.

Question 2: Which project typology and which method? At an SMB the project mix varies considerably: regulated projects with hard stage gates (banking, insurance, pharma, public sector) require waterfall-driven steering; exploratory tech projects require agile steering with Scrum or Kanban; cross-functional multi-team rollouts require hybrid methods with an agile core and waterfall governance at the interfaces. List the dominant project type and the expected methodology explicitly in the ad. A profile from the classic waterfall world does not have the same reflexes as a profile from an agile tech background; recruiting without a definition attracts heterogeneous applications and produces interviews in which everyone talks about a different role.

Question 3: Which multi-team responsibility? At a German SMB, the Project Manager can be the sole lead of a project with 5-15 people, or steer several parallel projects with workstream leads in each team. The nature of the role changes with the configuration: on a single project they spend 60-70 % of the time on execution and 30-40 % on stakeholder management; on several parallel projects the ratio inverts to 30-40 % execution and 60-70 % coordination and escalation management. Specify the expected configuration in the ad and test in the project case for the orchestration dimension, if it exists. An SMB with fewer than 60 employees rarely needs multi-project steering; the sole Project Manager on 1-2 projects is enough.

If the three answers converge on a mid-level Project Manager (3-7 years of experience) for an SMB with 30-200 employees and a defined project typology, see the ready-to-use template on the Job description tab.