How to Answer “How’s the Project Going?” in One Sentence

Family, if you got promoted and you’re now the person running a project, let me paint you a picture and see if it feels familiar.

You have dashboards. You have scorecards with twenty-plus rows. You have metrics coming at you from every direction. You are measuring everything. And yet, when your manager walks by your desk and says “how’s the project going,” you fumble.

I’ve sat in that exact seat. And I want to save you some time.

Years ago, after one of the many mergers I went through in corporate leadership, someone I respected set me up with a new potential mentor. I walked into that meeting proud. I had my deck, my dashboard, my cover page, and my polished story. I slid a copy across the table and started to open the first page.

He stopped me. And he asked me one question I could not answer that day, that week, or honestly for a while after.

That one question changed how I ran every project after that.

In this episode, I share the dead-simple three-part filter that came out of that meeting, how to tell the story of your project to your manager, your peers, and your team without burying anyone in data, and how to tell the difference between the numbers that matter and the ones that are just noise.

You don’t need more numbers. You need to know if you’re delivering.

And you need to be able to say it simply.

Related Radio Show: The Leader I Needed