What Is Project Thinking?

John's Story: Letting the work define itself

John decides to build a personal website.

He finally has the time, the spark, a rough idea of what it should be.
If he doesn't start now, who knows when the next best moment will come.

So, he makes himself a cup of coffee, opens a template and gets going.

John is not an overthinker.
He believes in getting things done 💪

“I'll just get it on the screen first… then I’ll see what’s missing.”

John knows what he wants on a landing page:

a hero section
a flagship project
an about section
maybe a contact form

That’s pretty much what the template already offers.

It also has a nice blog layout.

"Hmm.. Should I add a blog?"

He also wants to showcase more of his projects — but he’s not sure yet how that should look. He’d explore what the template can do and go from there.

⏰ For this amount of work a week should be enough.

John’s site takes shape quickly!

He uses AI to help with the text.
It’s not really his voice, but he would not write it better, so he keeps it.

From day one, the landing page looks like something that could be published 🚀

John gets passionate about the blog idea and spends time setting it up properly.
He even writes a few posts to fill the space.

Presentation of his work is trickier.
His projects don’t fit the layout — they need more context than the template allows.
He tries to stretch it — adds more text, rearranges sections, experiments a bit. Nothing really clicks.

“Okay… this is taking too long. I’ll just stick to the template.”

It fits better, but doesn't really do his projects justice.

After two weeks, the site is almost there.
All sections are complete, all basic functionality is there.
But something is off 🤔

The homepage feels a bit vague.
The projects look fine, but don’t really explain themselves.

He notices it — but isn’t sure what exactly is wrong or what he would expect to see instead.‍

“I’ll keep playing with it… it'll click eventually.”

Eventually, it stops being fun. He adds a few final things. Analytics, for example — it feels like something that a proper site should have.

He publishes the site:

"It looks good. Not fully what I envisioned, but it's ok."

He shares the site a few times, and people react positively. They tell him it looks nice, clean, and well put together. A few of them click through and explore it briefly, but nothing really happens after that. The conversations don’t move forward, and no clear follow-up comes out of it 😔

And the blog? John never posts anything again.

What happened here?

Was John doing something wrong? Not at all. He started with energy, followed what made sense in the moment, and pushed things forward until they were good enough to launch. That alone puts him ahead of many. Still... even though the site was technically there, it didn’t do much for John.

John obviously had the skills, he cared, and he put enough effort. He just never really treated the work as a project. He let it unfold without much structure or direction. First, it felt like freedom, but over time, that freedom turned into drift. Nothing obviously wrong, just small decisions that kept taking the project in slightly different directions. This is where project thinking begins to matter.

Now let’s see what changes when the project is approached differently.

Emily's Story: Shaping the outcome with intention

Emily decides to build a personal website.

She finally has the time, the spark, a rough idea of what it should be. She could just start.

Instead, she takes a notebook and answers one question:

“Why am I creating this website?”

To have her work out there? Sure. But what does that actually mean?
She wants to attract new clients. But also find people she can collaborate with — people who understand the kind of work she does.

So, the site needs two layers:

one that is clear, direct, and easy to grasp
one that shows the depth of her work for those who know what they’re looking at

🗼 She doesn’t need a full creative brief — those few notes are enough to guide the project and keep her from building the wrong thing.

She checks how others do it, scans layouts, tone, little details.
From complete websites, she quickly sees what works and what doesn’t.
As she collects ideas — way too many at first — she finally puts together a moodboard that feels like her 🎨

After exploring a few templates and AI builders, she decides to build the site herself — using pre-made components where they make sense.

Before moving on, she asks:

“What’s the hidden work here?”

Hosting, responsiveness, SEO, analytics, performance. The kind of work that’s easy to ignore at the beginning — and painful to discover too late.

Emily also knows she’ll be doing several things at once:

learning new tools
writing content
building the website
doing graphic design

Juggling this many roles has overwhelmed her before 🤯

Looking at the full scope now, Emily realizes she can’t solve everything in the first version.

"That’s fine. I just need something strong enough to test the direction."

With a clear direction in mind, Emily starts building. She quickly catches herself spending time on details that don’t really move the work forward 🔎. She writes a note and sticks it to her monitor:

“Progress > Perfection”

The note doesn’t magically stop the productive procrastination. But more than once, it helps her get back on track.

Emily keeps her workflow simple:

layout and styles first
placeholder content
feedback early
real content next
feedback again
polish at the end

Not everything works 🚧. Some components don’t behave the way she expected, and creating visuals takes longer than she thought.

At times, she gets stuck. But she knows what the site is supposed to do. Instead of adjusting the idea to fit the tools, she looks for workarounds 🛠️

As Emily works on her site, she keeps checking it against the two groups she defined at the beginning.

Is it clear enough for someone who just landed on it?
And does it go deep enough for someone who wants to understand the work?

She shows it to a few friends:

“This is interesting, but I’d have to read too much.”

→ she shortens project intros and highlights key points

“I can’t tell what part was yours.”

→ she adds a “my role” section to each project

Small changes, but it finally clicks 🤩

Once the flow of the site feels right, Emily publishes it.

“I could keep improving it… but that’s exactly how this drags on forever.”

She shares it with a few people and starts using it in her conversations.

No clients come directly from it, but the conversations feel different. People arrive with context. They’ve already seen her work and have a sense of what she does.

Things move forward more easily 🤝

Before moving on to the next thing, she makes a few notes for her future self:

What worked and what didn't.
A quick note on the custom scripts.
A structure for adding new projects to the portfolio.
And a short list of things to improve next time.

She looks at the site again. It’s not perfect, but it’s solid, and it represents her well. There’s a sense that she could take on something bigger now — and actually pull it off 🌟

What changed?

Emily didn’t avoid the messy parts of the project. She still had to learn new tools, write the content, shape the design, deal with technical limitations, and make decisions without having all the answers. What changed was that she stayed oriented while doing all of it. She defined who the site was for, did the research, took a moment to understand the real scope, and didn’t try to solve everything at once.

That’s what project thinking looks like in practice. It’s the ability to stay oriented while doing complex work — to know what you’re trying to achieve, to have something to check your decisions against, and to decide when the work is doing its job. Because of that, Emily didn’t get lost. She didn’t waste time or energy, and she always knew whether she was moving in the right direction. In the end, she didn’t just deliver the site — she made it work for the purpose she had defined.

Thinking in projects

What Emily did might feel intuitive. She didn’t follow a formal process. She didn’t open a project management book.

She simply made a few good decisions at the right moments.

Was she just more organized than John? Not really. But she definitely had her own way of thinking about work. If you look more closely at her approach, a pattern starts to appear. In project management, that pattern is often described through five modes of thinking:

Thinking mode

What Emily did

Initiating

Clarified why the website exists and who it’s for

Planning

Defined the structure, visuals, and realistic scope of work

Executing

Built the site in iterations and adjusted along the way

Monitoring

Collected feedback and stayed aligned with the goal

Closing

Reflected on the process and reused the learning later

Emily didn’t label any of this, she moved through these modes naturally.
We won’t focus too much on terminology either — but this structure gives us a clearer way to understand what’s happening inside a project.

Why project thinking matters

As long as Emily worked alone, the project remained relatively straightforward. One person, one direction, one set of decisions. But projects become much harder the moment other people enter the picture. Information is incomplete, priorities shift, people want different outcomes, and blockers appear outside your control.

At that point, projects become less about simply building something well, and more about keeping many moving parts aligned while the ground keeps shifting.

People are expected to make difficult decisions: what matters now, what can wait, what risk is acceptable, what trade-off is worth making. Project managers and scrum masters can help create structure around the process — but they can’t make every decision or hold every piece of context for the team.

Most people are never really taught how to think through that complexity — they’re simply dropped into it.

That’s why project thinking matters. It gives people a way to stay oriented and keep moving forward, even when the environment around them keeps changing.