Piper Katherine Gaul

I truly attribute my success to my parents first and foremost, because they were the ones who were driving me to the places I was producing even in middle school and high school. They were driving me around town to film these movies and to film festivals, and they really supported me from a very young age. But then even getting further in my career, the first job I got in New York - the whole reason I moved to New York City - was because my friend just happened to be working on this COVID team, and she needed an extra person. She asked if I wanted to be her assistant, and I said yes, of course, like a job is a job, and it's in film, and it's in something like operations which I'm interested in. So again, I really attribute a lot of my success to the people who are around me and who have really helped me grow, and who have given me all of these opportunities. All of my friends and family members who have taken a chance on me - I'm very grateful for them.

I was advised by supervisors to set boundaries and stop working extreme hours; at one point, I was working 100-hour weeks. I also learned to advocate for myself and lean on mentors, recognizing that strong guidance can shape long-term success without risking burnout.

As a woman, you're going to have to work twice as hard, and you're going to have to smile when you don't want to, just to get where you need to go. But it's not being disingenuous - it's coming from a place of confidence, where it's like, okay, yeah, I can get through this. If you're someone who is in a more junior position, just starting out, maybe coming out of college, really take that time and figure out who you are yourself. You have to be strong, but then choose your battles, essentially. You have to be strategic about it. A lot of women, myself included, go out super headstrong, because a lot of women who are in project management are very headstrong women, as they should be. But you have to figure out how to choose your battles and know what battles are worth actually fighting and which ones you can let go, because at the end of the day, if you do try to fight every battle, you're just going to exhaust yourself. I would work 100-hour weeks, not even joking, and my bosses were like, you have to stop doing this. So it's choosing your battles, but also not working yourself to death, and understanding that the right bosses and the people you're actually going to work for are not going to - as long as the job gets done, most of the time, that's all anyone cares about. You have to have that work-life balance. You can be a very strong woman, personally and professionally, and not have to fight every single battle. You can still be very strong-minded and strong-willed, and a very strong leader, and I think you're a stronger leader by having that discernment.

The biggest challenge in project management right now is really balancing working with logistics and making sure deadlines are hit, while also understanding that at the end of the day, if you are a project manager, you are a people manager as much as anything else. Yes, you have the spreadsheets and the stakeholders in your ear trying to give you last-minute changes and deadlines that you need to hit, but I think that one of the biggest challenges I see with myself and also with others I work with occasionally is that in order to truly be an effective project manager, you're only as good as your team. If your team is unhappy, if your team feels like they're not being listened to, if they feel like you're stressed, that affects everything. Especially toward the end of my time at the shelter, where things were getting very political very quickly and we weren't really sure what was happening - there were times where we found out things through a press release. I had to really make sure that even though I had friends who were on my teams, I was composed, and I was able to find those people like my boss Dana Santiago who I was able to confide in, so that I could still project that feeling of calm across my team. As a project manager, the hardest part is to be that really composed leader, because your emotions are leading the rest of the team. It's taking that sometimes stressful, jarring information and disseminating it in a way that is not going to lie to people, but is not going to cause more panic than necessary. On the opportunity side, I really do think AI is a massive thing. It's not looking at AI as a way to replace project management, but looking at AI for things like that workflow I created - it takes away some of the more tedious tasks that team members and myself are getting caught up doing, like entering a spreadsheet that can be done in a minute with an AI model. Integrating AI into how we work as project managers is just as important as knowing the skills yourself - not as a crutch, but as a tool.

I value my relationships greatly - my family relationships, friend relationships, work relationships. I don't think that I would be half the person I am today, personally or professionally, without all the people around me. With that comes kindness and trustworthiness, but also authenticity. I really value authenticity and communication within my personal life and my professional life. I think that as long as you're true to yourself - this looks so lame, but I feel like as long as you're true to yourself, you're going to at least make yourself happy. And I think that that's incredibly important.