I was a PM. I became a PM at a consultancy. Sounds like the same job.
Spoiler: it is not. 😅
Before consulting, I spent around 10 years as an in-house PM. I was used to being inside the organization. I could talk directly to Marketing or Finance, check a contract myself, or find the right person in leadership when I needed an answer.
I could pull the levers.
Then I joined consulting. Suddenly, the levers were somewhere else.
The moment I realized I wasn’t inside anymore
A client team would say, “We’ll discuss this internally and get back to you.”
And I would think: Wait. You’re going to discuss something… without me? 😂
Or: “We need to request this information from another team.” I couldn’t just message that team myself. I couldn’t chase the answer. I couldn’t make sure the question was understood or that someone was actually going to respond.
There were whole departments I simply didn’t have access to. I couldn’t see the contracts directly. I couldn’t run certain financial analyses myself. I didn’t have direct access to customer research or analytics. I wasn’t part of the conversations happening between departments.
Learning to work differently
And honestly? At first, it was frustrating. I felt slow and a bit powerless. I was used to being able to just go and get things done, and suddenly I couldn’t.
I kept thinking: I would do this so much faster! 😅
But when you can’t just go and get every answer yourself, you have to work differently. You start asking: What do we actually know? What are we missing? What assumptions are we making? Who do we need to involve? What risks are hidden behind the information we have?
The context I was missing
And you start realizing that some of the things you thought were “slowness” actually have context you simply couldn’t see.
An approval that looks unnecessarily slow might need to go through several layers of the organization. A request that takes weeks might be sitting with a team that’s already overloaded with requests from across the company.
When you’re in-house, you often know these things without even thinking about them. You hear the conversations. You know the history. You know who to call. You know what happened six months ago that explains what’s happening today.
As a consultant, you’re not part of that organizational life. And that’s not exclusion. It’s just distance. You are working with the team, but you’re not necessarily inside the team.
That distance was difficult for me at first.
But it also forced me to develop a different muscle: influence.
The muscle I had to develop
I couldn’t always make the decision myself. I had to make a recommendation, explain why I believed it was the right one, and build enough trust that the team would actually consider it. I had to understand who had influence, when to push, and when to step back and let the client own the decision.
I’m still figuring out that last one. 😂
And here’s the funny part: I think I’m much better at influencing now than I was as an in-house PM. Not because I suddenly discovered some magical consulting technique. I simply had to learn it. When you have direct access and authority, you don’t always notice how much those things help you create momentum. Consulting took some of that away. So when someone followed my recommendation, I had to rely much more on trust, reasoning, and how I communicated it.
And I think that changed how I see the PM role itself.
When I stopped doing everything myself
In-house, especially in a fast-moving company, it’s very easy to spend your time running: you have a problem → find someone → get the answer → make the decision → move on.
Consulting gave me more space to stop. To understand the context, map risks, surface gaps, facilitate discussions, challenge assumptions, and help the team make better decisions rather than always making the decision myself.
I also had to learn something else: just because I could do something faster myself doesn’t mean I should.
My biggest takeaway
I joined thinking I would basically do the same job in a different environment. Instead, I lost some of the access and authority I was used to. It was uncomfortable. But losing those levers forced me to become more deliberate about how I create impact.
I used to think that part of being a good PM was being able to make things happen. Now I’m starting to think it’s just as much about helping other people make things happen.
Nine months in, I don’t think I’m the same PM I was when I started 🚀.