Job Descriptions / Project Manager
Project Manager Job Description Template for Agencies
A practical, ready-to-post JD for agency project managers. Built for the realities of juggling multiple clients, hybrid delivery, and tight margins rather than generic PMO work.
What does a project manager do at an agency?
An agency project manager is the person who turns a signed SOW into shipped work. They break the scope into tasks, sequence them, assign owners, and make sure the team delivers within budget and without the client going dark. They own the plan, the risk log, and the weekly rhythm of delivery across multiple concurrent projects.
Unlike in-house PMs who often work inside one product, agency PMs context-switch between clients, verticals, and disciplines several times a day. The best ones keep their heads during launch weeks, protect creative and engineering time from scope creep, and translate messy client feedback into clean, actionable briefs.
Job description template
Job title
Project Manager (Agency)
Summary
We're hiring a Project Manager to own the plan, budget, and delivery rhythm for a portfolio of concurrent client projects. You'll work across creative, strategy, and engineering to ship work on time, on budget, and at the quality our clients pay us for. You'll partner closely with account managers on scope and commercials.
Responsibilities
- Plan, scope, and schedule 5-10 concurrent client projects across multiple disciplines.
- Build and maintain project timelines, resource plans, and burn reports in the agency's PM tool.
- Run daily standups, weekly status meetings, and sprint or milestone reviews with internal teams.
- Translate creative briefs and SOWs into task lists, owners, dependencies, and realistic deadlines.
- Track hours against budgets and flag over-servicing or under-servicing within 10% variance.
- Coordinate with account managers on scope changes, pricing for extras, and change orders.
- Manage client expectations on delivery dates without over-promising internal capacity.
- Lead post-mortems after major launches and turn findings into process improvements.
- Partner with resourcing and capacity leads to forecast team utilization two to four weeks ahead.
- Unblock teams by escalating risks early and brokering trade-offs between scope, time, and quality.
Required qualifications
- 3+ years of project management experience inside a creative, digital, or marketing agency.
- Direct experience managing projects with budgets between $50K and $500K.
- Hands-on mastery of at least one agency PM tool (Asana, Monday, Jira, ClickUp, Notion).
- Comfortable reading a project P&L and understanding hours, rate cards, and margin.
- Strong written communication for status reports, risk logs, and client-facing updates.
- Experience coordinating work across creative, strategy, and engineering or development teams.
- Ability to hold senior stakeholders accountable without damaging the relationship.
Preferred qualifications
- PMP, PRINCE2, Scrum Master, or equivalent project management certification.
- Experience with resource planning tools such as AgencyPro, Float, Resource Guru, or Runn.
- Exposure to agile or hybrid delivery methodologies on software or product projects.
- Background in the agency's primary vertical (SaaS, ecommerce, B2B, healthcare, etc.).
- Bachelor's degree in business, communications, or a technical discipline.
Salary range
United States
- Junior (1-3 yrs): $55,000 - $75,000 base
- Mid (3-6 yrs): $75,000 - $100,000 base
- Senior (6+ yrs): $100,000 - $135,000 base
Sources: Glassdoor, Built In, Salary.com (2025-2026 US medians).
Global
- UK: GBP 35,000 - 65,000
- EU: EUR 40,000 - 70,000
- Canada: CAD 60,000 - 105,000
- LATAM / remote: USD 28,000 - 60,000
Sources: Payscale, LinkedIn Salary, Remote.com benchmarks.
Top skills to look for
- Scoping and estimation accuracy
- Resource planning and utilization management
- Risk identification and proactive escalation
- Stakeholder communication across client and internal teams
- Tool fluency (PM, time tracking, financial)
- Scope control and change-order discipline
- Calm facilitation under deadline pressure
- Retrospective and process improvement mindset
Red flags
- Cannot describe how they handle a project running 20% over budget mid-flight.
- Uses only gut feel for estimates with no reference to historical data.
- Describes the role as "keeping the Asana board tidy" with no commercial ownership.
- Has never run a post-mortem or proposed a process change that stuck.
- Job-hops between agencies every 12-18 months with no clear narrative.
Interview process structure
Stage 1: Recruiter or hiring manager screen (30 min)
Confirm tool fluency, project size and type, comp expectations, and motivation. Screen out candidates whose experience is purely in-house or consulting rather than agency delivery.
Stage 2: Hiring manager deep-dive (60 min)
Walk through two projects they delivered: one that went well, one that went off the rails. Probe for specific risks, trade-offs, and how they communicated with clients and leadership.
Stage 3: Scenario or planning exercise (60-90 min)
Hand them a disguised brief and SOW. Ask them to produce a timeline, resource plan, risk register, and a communication plan. Evaluate realism, structure, and commercial thinking.
Stage 4: Panel with delivery and leadership (60 min)
Cross-functional panel including a creative or engineering lead, an account manager, and a leader. Evaluate collaboration style, decisiveness under pressure, and facilitation skills.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between a project manager and a producer?
In most agencies they overlap. "Producer" is more common in creative and production shops and implies ownership of the craft as well as the plan. "Project manager" is more common in digital and tech-heavy agencies and tends to lean into process, tooling, and multi-discipline coordination.
Do agency PMs need a technical background?
Not always, but PMs on software, web, or product projects should understand basic delivery concepts: sprints, QA cycles, environments, and dependencies. Pure creative production PMs can succeed without a technical background if they understand production pipelines.
How many projects should one PM run at once?
It depends on complexity. A typical senior PM can manage 5-10 concurrent projects or one large program. Going above 10 usually erodes the PM's ability to spot risk and forces them into reactive firefighting.
Should PMs be client-facing?
Yes, for logistics and delivery. Client-facing PMs reduce the load on account managers and build trust through reliability. Commercial conversations (scope increases, renewals, price) should still go through the account manager.
Agile or waterfall for agency projects?
Hybrid is the reality. Most agencies plan milestones and budgets like waterfall because clients buy fixed scopes, but execute creative and engineering work in sprints. The best PMs can hold both frames at once.
Give your PMs the tools they deserve
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