PM Roundup: The Architecture of Managing Things

Senior Project Manager Emilija Morica and Hajnalka Mühl, ZOA Studio’s Assistant Head of Art, reflect on project management, expectations, reading clients, and why the first conversation changes everything.

In her first months as a project manager in Budapest, Emilija stepped onto the office balcony after back-to-back client calls. The pressure of demands and deadlines had left her shaken. It was an early lesson in the role she had just taken on at ZOA Studio. That afternoon left her with a lasting impression of the weight of the job at an international studio.

Two years later, Emilija recalls the scene with a smile, knowing what she didn’t then—that moments like those are part of the quiet, unseen work of balancing expectations, personalities, and time zones. 

Across the table from Emilija in the meeting room sits Hajni, ZOA’s Assistant Head of Art, who has been at the studio long enough to watch the company evolve from a small team into an international company with projects crossing six continents. Before she became a mother, she often arrived by seven—pen poised over a fresh to-do list. “I always start with the list,” she says. For her, it provides direction and serves as a guide for the day.

Both managers describe their work as if it exists on two planes at once. There’s the visible layer: calls, emails, shared documents, and image previews. And then there’s the subtler one: listening closely for the unspoken in a client’s voice, noticing when an artist hesitates over a request, recognising when the same adjective—dramatic, surprising, elegant—comes up more than once in a conversation. The first is about logistics; the second is about reading people.

“The first meeting is the most important,” Emilija says. She has learned that the opening conversation with a client shapes everything that follows, especially when working across languages and cultures. Some clients prefer to send everything in writing and “just get the job done”; others will linger over a video call, describing the project in a way that reveals as much about their priorities as the brief itself. She often pushes gently for at least one face-to-face conversation at the outset. “You think you’ve shared everything in writing,” she tells clients, “but there’s always something extra that comes out when we talk.”

For Hajni, the first stage of a project—the briefing, the early sketches—is the most critical. If the starting point is vague, it won’t “magically become clear later on,” she says. A misplaced expectation early on can ripple through every stage, right up to the final delivery. The goal is alignment: making sure the client’s vision and ZOA Studio’s standards are aimed at the same target.

Sometimes, that alignment is clearly missing from the outset. Hajni recalls first meetings where a client will share a reference image—something they love—that has almost nothing in common with our style. “You can see on our website it’s nothing like what we do,” she says. “So why come to ZOA if this is what you like?” The answer is often more nuanced than it seems. A client might be drawn to one small element—a texture, a mood, “the waves in the water”—rather than the whole composition. Without an early conversation to unpack exactly what they see in that image, both sides can end up speaking different languages before the work has even begun.

Quality is less a checklist than a shared ethos. It’s the difference between delivering exactly what the client wants and offering something they need—but didn’t know what to ask for—a composition, a lighting choice, a point of view that elevates the design. “If you lower the standard once,” Hajni says, “you risk lowering it later on.” Emilija nods, calling it “boring” to simply hand over whatever is asked for without bringing any artistic eye to it.

Both have learned that persuasion is part of the craft. Hajni and Emilija tell stories of clients insisting on details that make little sense—like every interior light switched on in a broad daylight image. Instead of dismissing the request, they ask why. Often, the answer reveals an underlying concern—visibility, atmosphere, emphasis—that can be solved in a better-looking way. “It’s not about always having the solution ready,” Hajni says. “It’s about understanding the problem first.”

That same sensitivity applies to communication styles. With international clients, communication styles vary in ways that have little to do with language. Some speak in precise, measured terms; others work in bursts of urgency, moving from calm to high alert in the space of a single email. Emilija sees part of her role as translating not only the requests but the emotions behind them—filtering out unnecessary sharpness so the message reaches the artists without friction. “Sometimes it sounds strange,” she says, “but if it matters to the client, it matters to us.”

There’s a fine line between advocating for the client and protecting the creative team. Hajni describes it as a balance that shifts with every project, and one that’s easier to find once you know the personalities involved. “You have to learn how people react,” she says. “Some need a call; others want everything in writing. Some need more push; others, less.” With long-term collaborators, she can anticipate these needs. With new ones, the early days are spent learning their personalities and preferences.

Over time, both project managers have built their own ways of staying grounded. For Emilija, it’s often a conversation in the office kitchen—airing out tension over coffee with a colleague, swapping stories until the pressure fades. For Hajni, the practice has been more deliberate: office days for collaborative work, home days for deep focus. In the office, every little noise or interaction can pull her out of her rhythm—not in a “bad” way, but enough to break focus. She didn’t immediately see the benefits of that disruption, but later recognised the value of spontaneous learning and exchanges with colleagues. “I used to live only by the to-do list,” she says. “Now I make space to just listen, even if it’s not visible in the results right away.”

Our conversation in the main meeting room inevitably circles back to “quality.” It’s the thread running through every story with the managers—what defines the studio, what complicates the job, and what makes it worth doing. In architecture visualization, beauty can be subjective, but certain standards are not. The images must meet both the client’s expectations and the studio’s own artistic bar, and those two aren’t always aligned.

The trick, Hajni says, is to create space for creativity within the structure. The workflow is deliberately designed to protect the early sketch and testing phase, when experimentation is encouraged. “That’s where you can try things, see what works,” she says. “Once we move past that, the changes are smaller, more focused.” Emilija puts it another way: “The more order there is, the more space you actually have for creativity. You’re not wasting time figuring out the process—you can spend it on the work itself.”

If there’s a single piece of advice they give to new project managers, it’s this: be a sponge. Absorb everything you can—the tools, the culture, the way different people communicate—before trying to change anything. In time, you’ll see where the system can bend, where it can improve. But first, you have to understand it from the inside.

Two years on from that afternoon in the balcony, Emilija still has days that end differently than they began, with projects taking unexpected turns. Hajni still makes her lists, knowing they’ll be rewritten by noon. Over time, they’ve learned that the job is less about avoiding these disruptions than about moving with them—keeping the work steady, keeping the quality high, and, when needed, stepping onto the balcony for a breath before going back in.

What their stories reveal is that project management is its own form of architecture: not of buildings, but of relationships and trust. Behind every rendering lies this hidden scaffolding—the balance of logistics and empathy—that makes the work possible, and keeps ZOA’s quality alive on the global market.

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