Quite a lot of work.

Link up with business development on new feasible projects and draw up the charter to convince the management that a new project is worth the investment.

Loads of meetings with defined outputs to meet. The quality guys will be there to make sure you stick to agenda and get everyone to clear off the agenda of the day. You won't have a meeting that's talking about nothing, it is always about meeting some input. The meetings can take place during the wee hours of the morning in order to accommodate customers or colleagues from another time zone. Sometimes in teams sometimes in zoom whichever customer wants. Before the covid, I have to fly over to customer's sites when we have major buy off gates to clear.

Sometimes project team members run into disputes with customers, so I need to coordinate with stakeholders to negotiate until the disputes are resolved.

Some software or products end up with automotive, telecommunications or aerospace so I need to get the right quality team to support because each industry have their own requirements and it's a pain in the ass to have violations. Be at customer audits which sometimes take place in a remote location in the industrial area of rural US, Europe or China. Luckily we have a global team of subject matter experts to support, so I don't have to do everything myself.

Make sure the design is up to customers requirement because they sometimes change their mind every now and then jeopardizing my deadlines. Our design engineers also may have different ideas which I need to align them with customer expectations so I really need to have some technical knowledge. I will have to renegotiate new deadlines to avoid penalty. Just like one of the major auto customer suddenly decided to change a related part from another supplier and it affected our development. The original DFM didn't work anymore and we had to restart many activities setting us back 2 gates which is about 6-9 months of wasted efforts. So I had to negotiate with legal and product management on compensation from the customer that was pre-agreed in our master service agreement with customer and reset the new deadlines.

It's a very challenging job of communication and coordination with a global team and customer under pressing schedule. No one day is alike with another.