Brett Miller's journey from spreadsheet warrior to strategic leader at Amazon offers valuable insights for PMs ready to embrace the future.
Remember the last time you spent your Friday afternoon collecting status updates from five different teams? Your weekend plans on hold while you piece together progress reports? You're not alone. Project managers spend up to 100 hours annually just collating status information – that's two and a half weeks of your life spent on manual updates.
To understand how AI is transforming this landscape, we turned to Brett Miller, who leads projects for Amazon's Alexa Artificial Generative Intelligence team. His journey from spreadsheet warrior to strategic leader offers valuable insights for PMs ready to embrace the future.
With 85% of PMs running multiple projects simultaneously, keeping spreadsheets updated can feel like a never-ending race. "Before AI, we relied heavily on spreadsheets and manual updates," Miller recalls. "While this worked to some extent, it often left us reacting to problems rather than anticipating them."
Sound familiar? You're in good company. Only 34% of organizations complete projects mostly or always on time, and many PMs report spending valuable hours on manual tracking instead of proactively addressing the complex challenges that can derail project timelines.
Picture this: You're leading a high-stakes feature launch, and instead of being blindsided by capacity issues, you get an early warning that your QA team is heading toward overload. That's exactly what happened when Miller's team adopted AI-driven project management tools.
"The platform had a workload management feature that used AI to assess team capacity," Miller explains. "Early on, it flagged that our QA team was at risk of being overloaded due to overlapping deadlines. Without that insight, we likely wouldn't have caught the issue until much later."
This kind of predictive power is exactly what 54% of project managers say they're missing in their current toolkit.
Let's be honest – change isn't always easy. When Miller first introduced AI tools to his team, not everyone was ready to jump on board. "At first, some team members were hesitant to rely on AI predictions," he shares. "There was a learning curve, and some were more comfortable with manual processes."
The turning point? Results they could see and feel. When team members experienced first-hand how AI could prevent overtime work and reduce last-minute fire drills, resistance began to melt away.
Here's where it gets exciting. Remember those hours spent chasing updates and managing spreadsheets? AI tools can give that time back, allowing you to focus on what really matters: strategic leadership.
"Instead of spending time manually tracking team capacity or micromanaging dependencies," Miller explains, "I was able to focus on strategic leadership. I had more bandwidth to think about long-term goals and guide the team in innovative directions."
This evolution couldn't come at a better time. Strategic leadership and communication are projected to be the most crucial PM skills over the next five years.
With the project management software market projected to reach $15.08 billion by 2030, AI isn't just changing our tools – it's reshaping our role as project managers. The question isn't whether to embrace this change, but how to get started.
Start small, be patient with your team's adjustment period, and keep your focus on the end goal: transforming from a task tracker into a strategic leader. Your future self (and your team) will thank you.
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