There are also “certifications” for AWS. I have six of them. They prove nothing as far as competence in an of themselves.

In the grand scheme of things, project management is about making sure projects are done on time, on budget and meets requirements.

It’s about managing dependencies, from a software development methodology, it’s creating a directed acyclic graph but with people instead of computers.

It’s also dealing with managing stakeholders, contributors, blockers, budgets, scheduling meetings, keeping the higher up informed, etc.

If you put a gun to my head, I can be a competent project manager. As a “staff” software architect half of my job managing cloud projects as a tech lead with the other half being more of a solution architect when we first sign a customer and designing an implementation plan with work streams and epics.

Usually I end up splitting the project management part up with a real project manager.

It’s not because of a lack of competence. It’s bandwidth.

But just like you can’t be a good tech lead if you don’t have some level of competence technically, you have to be decent at project management.