I set out to build a website and ended up spending most of the time on a single sentence.
The goal was modest: something easy to maintain, cheap to run, and not identical to every other project-manager portfolio online. The design and the code turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was answering one question honestly, and it took far longer than any of the building did.
The question I couldn’t answer quickly
Before I touched a layout or wrote a line of code, I had to work out what this site was actually going to say. Not my skills, not my certifications, not my years of experience — every PM lists those, and on a page they blur together. The real question was narrower and more uncomfortable: what is the one thing I do that isn’t quite the same as what everyone else does?
I sat with that for a while, and the honest answer was one I had been slightly avoiding.
The answer: I work between two rooms
I didn’t come to project management in a straight line. I grew up in a family that ran businesses, so I understood how companies actually make decisions before I understood much else. The software-engineering degree came afterward, which meant I also understood, at a working level, how the things a business decides to build actually get built.
Most project managers are fluent in one of those two worlds. What I do — the part that is genuinely mine — is work in the space between them: making sure the people who imagine a project and the people who engineer it are describing the same thing, and catching the expensive misunderstandings before they get built. Once I could say that plainly, the rest of the site had something to organize itself around.
Why the plain version was the hard version
The temptation, when you write about yourself, is to reach for something that sounds impressive. I went through a few versions like that, and they all had the same problem: they could have been written by anyone. The moment the sentence became specific and true — the two worlds, and the work of moving between them — it stopped sounding like marketing and started sounding like a description. That became the test I kept coming back to: if a line could belong to any competent PM, it wasn’t worth keeping.
The build: quiet, and close to free
The site itself is deliberately unremarkable to run. It’s built on Astro, which generates static HTML, so it loads quickly and costs nothing to host on Vercel’s free tier. Custom email runs through Cloudflare’s email routing into Gmail, also free. Every case study and every post is a plain markdown file, so adding one is a matter of writing the file and pushing it. There is no CMS to log into and no subscription to keep alive.
The part I’d pass on: write the brand down
One detail worth repeating. Everything about how the site is meant to read — the through-line, the voice, the words I use and the ones I avoid — lives in a single markdown file in the project. Any AI tool I point at the project reads that file first, which keeps the writing consistent whether I’m drafting it myself or working with a tool. Keeping all of that in one honest document did more for consistency than any style guide I could have written for myself.
What I’d tell anyone starting
The design and the code were never the hard part. The hard part was answering the question honestly: what do you actually do that isn’t quite like anyone else’s version of it? Not the polished answer — the real one. Everything else on the site followed from getting that one sentence right.
adnanpm.com