Day 1 — Building from Scratch

You log into your first video call at 8:30 AM Eastern from your home office. The calendar invite reads: 'ERP-CRM Integration — PM Onboarding with Seth Kaufman.' Your laptop shows a clean PepsiCo desktop with access to Jira, Confluence, SAP GUI, and Salesforce already provisioned. IT was efficient — you got your credentials last Friday.

Seth Kaufman appears on screen from PepsiCo's Purchase, NY headquarters. Behind him, you can see an open-plan office floor with the PepsiCo logo on a glass partition wall. He's in a button-down shirt, no jacket — the kind of dressed-down corporate that signals seniority without formality.

"Welcome aboard. I'm glad we got you — this project has been waiting for a PM for six weeks and the business is getting impatient." He walks you through the project's history: how the NAB sales team has been manually re-entering orders between Salesforce and SAP for three years, how pricing errors caused an embarrassing incident with Walmart's buying team last quarter, and how the new SVP of Sales made this integration her top priority.

Seth shares his screen — a Confluence page with the project's key documents, stakeholder list, and governance structure. "I manage twelve active projects. Yours is one of three I've flagged as strategic priority. That means I'm paying attention, but I'm not going to micromanage you. I need a clean RAID log, a Friday status report by 4pm, and no surprises in SteerCo. Do that and I'll give you full autonomy."

He pauses. "One thing you should know: this is a Greenfield build. There's no legacy integration to rip out, no predecessor's mess to clean up. That's the good news. The challenge is that nobody has done this before at PepsiCo for this division — so there's no playbook. You're writing it."