Project Management Apprentice

Liminal•Boston, MA

37d

About The Position

Ventures rarely die of one dramatic failure. They bleed out through small slips nobody owned: the dependency nobody named, the decision nobody chased, the week that quietly became three. Your job is to own the slips. Find them early, say them out loud, close them before they compound. Liminal is a Founders' Studio. We co-build with repeat founders, many of them unicorn founders, providing build expertise, capital, and unfair access from founding to Series B. We call ourselves a Founders' Studio because "venture studio" undersells what we do and oversells what most of them deliver. Project management has a reputation problem, mostly earned. Status meetings about status meetings. Gantt charts as wall art. Templates mistaken for thinking. None of that survives here, because at zero-to-one there's no PMO to hide in. There's a venture that has to ship, a dozen moving pieces, and a founder who needs one person who always knows where things actually stand, as opposed to where the slide says they stand. Product decides what and why. You make when and how come true. The craft is sequencing: knowing which delay costs a day and which one costs the launch, finding the critical path, and defending it daily from everything that wants to sit on it. Process here is instrumentation, not ritual. A meeting that produces no information gets deleted, by you.

Requirements

Open threads cause you physical discomfort. You follow up without being asked and confirm without being reminded.
Comfortable chasing people twice your age and three levels up, daily if needed, without making enemies of them.
Short, exact, dated meeting notes that settle arguments weeks later.
A systems mind, not a process fetishist. You'll delete a ritual as happily as you'll add one. The system serves the ship date, never the reverse.
Calm when things slip. Because they will. Bad news early beats good news late, every time, and you'd rather be the bearer than the reason.
Independent thinker. Arguments from first principles. Unafraid of unpopular positions, including telling a founder the date will move while it's still cheap to hear. You believe the best plans survive open debate. You know how to disagree and commit.
Early-career, deadline-tested. Fresh out of college or a year or two in, with evidence you've run something toward a date that could not move: a live event, a print run, a competition, a launch. Titles irrelevant. The date held or it didn't.

Nice To Haves

Enough technical literacy to read a burndown chart and smell sandbagging.
SQL or scripting skills to pull data yourself instead of asking for it.
Experience managing vendors or physical production, where "we'll fix it post-launch" isn't a sentence anyone gets to say.

Responsibilities

Run the standups, sprints, and retros across a venture. Every ceremony justifies itself by the information it produces, or it dies.
Map what blocks what. Learn which tasks have slack and which are load-bearing, and treat the load-bearing ones like they owe you money.
Provide status without spin. Ensure the dashboard shows the real number. Bad news travels fast and upward first. Escalation is a skill, not an admission of failure.
Ask what kills this project before the project starts, then retire the risks in order. Create a risk register people actually read, because it's short and true.
Act as the connective tissue between engineering, design, legal, vendors, and manufacturers. If something falls between two teams, it fell to you.
Manage the unglamorous checklist behind every clean launch: approvals, review windows, shipping deadlines, the hundred small things that are invisible until one is missing.