PML has a free webinar coming up that distills over 2 decades of project management lessons into a single hour.

Every attendee will receive a FREE copy of Pipeline’s Traveler spreadsheet, along with the context needed to understand how - and why - it works. Register at the link below. Space is limited!

In this episode:

Bonus Content:

Jeff Perry wrote his book "The Intentional Engineer" in 90 days, working backward from a deadline and hitting weekly milestones. But the concepts came from years of working with engineers stuck in opportunistic career mode - taking whatever came their way instead of building toward something deliberate. The book presents a five-level career model that shows most engineers operate between "surviving" and "opportunistic," never reaching the intentional growth stage where they define who they're becoming. Perry walks through practical frameworks: identifying your genius zone through flow states and skill combinations, shifting limiting mindsets through conscious experimentation, and moving from the zero-sum thinking of work-life balance to alignment where your professional and personal lives support each other. One client went from a toxic work environment to technical program management in her dream location with three raises. Another doubled his salary by articulating the unique combination of software leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and systems thinking that made him valuable.

>Listen to the full episode on our Youtube channel or on The wave

>If YouTube isn’t your thing, check out this episode and all of our past episodes on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.

Stop. Before you automate that manual process step-by-step, read this.

In the 1890s, inventors tried to ease the transition from horses to automobiles by building "horseless carriages" - mechanical contraptions with articulated metal legs, rein-based steering, and fake horse heads housing lamps.  They were solving the wrong problem. The answer wasn't replicating a horse. It was rethinking transportation entirely.

Modern automation projects make the same mistake. Your manual process evolved around human capabilities. Operators compensate for variation, use visual judgment, make micro-adjustments. Automating these workarounds directly creates complex, unreliable systems.

Pipeline Design & Engineering’s focus? Solving for the optimal outcome. Clear, reliable, effective.

Don't automate the workaround. Solve the actual problem.

Perry describes a career model that functions like a ladder, but it measures satisfaction and intention rather than corporate hierarchy. Most engineers recognize themselves somewhere in the middle.

The survival level isn't a failure. Engineers often need to operate there temporarily. But Perry sees many technical professionals who remain stuck in the third level: opportunistic. They accept whatever opportunities appear without asking if those opportunities serve their larger goals.

The shift to the fourth level - intentional or purposeful growth - requires defining who you're becoming. Not just what skills you want to acquire, but what kind of person and professional you're building toward. That clarity changes which opportunities you pursue and which you decline.

The fifth level, defined as you “life’s work”, extends beyond personal satisfaction. Engineers at this level influence others through leadership and the downstream effects of what they create. Their technical decisions affect products used globally, and operating from their best self means that work carries more impact.

Part 2 of my annual reset. Every January, I pull Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" off the shelf. Not for inspiration but for calibration. The psychiatrist who survived Nazi concentration camps by maintaining a sense of purpose developed a framework that separates achievement from meaning in both engineering work and life. Last year, while focusing on my growing family instead of traditional full-time work, I found myself helping former coworkers solve unsexy problems that moved the needle in profound ways. Frankl's three types of meaning - creating value beyond yourself, experiencing work deeply, and taking the right attitude toward unavoidable suffering - provided the lens to understand why those projects mattered more than any impressive technical milestone I'd shipped before.

To read the full article, visit the full article on The Wave.

Mike Landis, Director of Engineering at Pipeline Design & Engineering, will share the actual project management framework Pipeline uses every day to manage dozens of concurrent engineering development projects, where budgets are significant, schedules matter, and scope creep can quickly derail outcomes.

A central focus of this webinar is a project budget and schedule tracking tool that Pipeline has refined (the Pipeline “Traveler”), iterated, and improved over literally decades of real-world use by multiple engineers across multiple companies. This is not a template pulled from a book or software tool - it is a battle-tested spreadsheet built specifically for the realities of engineering development work.

Used properly, this tool helps teams:

For teams managing expensive engineering projects, the ability to surface issues early can easily save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And in this session, Pipeline is simply giving this tool away.

Every attendee will receive a FREE copy of Pipeline’s Traveler spreadsheet, along with the context needed to understand how - and why - it works. Register at the link below. Space is limited!