Digital PM Summit Asheville
Monday, October 19 - Tuesday, October 20, 2026
The Venue • 21 North Market Street • Asheville, NC 28801
Overview | Agenda | Speakers | Venue | What’s Included | Event Shirts
Your Digital PM Summit Speakers
Kelly Vega
Kelly Vega is a digital project management and delivery leader at VML with deep experience guiding complex web, software, and digital experience work across agency and client environments.
She is known for bringing clarity to ambiguity, creating structure around messy inputs, and helping teams move through high-emotion stakeholder dynamics with calm, practical leadership. Kelly also creates parody project management content as @nottheworstpm, where she translates the very real absurdities of PM life into relatable, human-centered humor. She has previously attended and presented at Digital PM Summit and is excited to return to the Bureau community.
Presentation • Monday, October 19 • 10:30-11:15 AM
Empathy for the Difficult Client (or Teammate)
Every project manager eventually encounters them: the client who questions everything, the stakeholder who never responds, the teammate who seems impossible to work with, or the person whose behavior turns every interaction into a challenge.
Our first instinct is often frustration, defensiveness, or avoidance. But what if the key to navigating difficult relationships isn't better control—it's better understanding?
In this session, we'll explore how empathy can become a practical project management tool. Through real-world examples and actionable techniques, you'll learn how to regulate your own emotional responses, uncover what's driving challenging behavior, and respond in ways that move projects forward without sacrificing your sanity.
We'll start with a simple breathing exercise to demonstrate how quickly stress can influence our reactions, then walk through a framework for approaching difficult conversations, managing conflict, setting boundaries, and maintaining professionalism when tensions run high.
Attendees will leave with practical tools for handling challenging clients, teammates, and stakeholders while protecting their own energy and strengthening relationships along the way.
Key Takeaways:
• Recognize the emotional triggers that can escalate conflict
• Use empathy to understand the motivations behind difficult behavior
• Navigate challenging conversations with greater confidence and clarity
• Set healthy boundaries without damaging relationships
• Develop a repeatable approach for managing difficult project situations
Victoria Wheelehan
Victoria Wheelehan is a Senior Product Development Engineer and Technical Program Manager at Nike with over a decade of experience leading complex initiatives across manufacturing, engineering, and digital transformation.
Her career began on the factory floor, where she progressed through facilities engineering and enterprise project leadership before stepping into global digital transformation roles spanning multiple sites and countries.
Victoria brings a grounded, operations‑first perspective to digital transformation, helping organizations adopt digital tools in ways that respect legacy environments while empowering frontline teams and delivering measurable business outcomes.
Her work focuses on aligning technology with real business; she is passionate about practical, people-centered transformation and believes the most successful digital initiatives are those that amplify human expertise rather than replace it. A PMP certified project management professional and international speaker, Victoria has shared her insights at forums including PMO Global Alliance Career Week and the Dubai International Project Management Forum.
Presentation • Monday, October 19 • 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM
From Factory Floor to Digital Transformation
Digital transformation sounds great in theory. In reality, it often means navigating resistance, disconnected systems, messy data, unclear ownership, and teams trying to keep day-to-day operations moving while everything changes around them.
In this session, Victoria Wheelehan shares lessons learned from leading a global digital transformation initiative inside a traditional manufacturing environment. Through practical examples and real-world challenges, this talk explores what it takes to create alignment, integrate systems and teams, and deliver measurable results without losing sight of the humans doing the work.
What you’ll take away
• Ways to address resistance and build buy-in for change
• Lessons for integrating systems, data, and teams
• Practical approaches to cross-functional collaboration
• Tips for measuring success beyond “we launched it”
• Real-world insights from digital transformation inside manufacturing environments
Maggie Lynn, PMP®
Maggie Lynn, PMP® is a Senior Producer at Threespot and a strategic delivery leader focused on the operating layer between strategy and execution.
Their work helps mission-driven teams create the stakeholder alignment, decision clarity, risk visibility, and communication rhythms ambitious digital transformation work needs to move with confidence. Maggie explores delivery as experience design: how systems, signals, and story help teams and clients understand, trust, and move through complex work.
Breakout Workshop • Monday, October 19 • 1:45-2:45 PM
From Plan to Experience: Designing Delivery That Actually Works
Most project delivery systems are designed for control - timelines, tasks, and outputs. But that’s not how clients and teams actually experience the work. They experience projects as clarity or confusion, momentum or friction, trust or uncertainty.
And when those experiences break down, no amount of process fixes it.
This session reframes delivery as experience design in practice. Because every project already creates an experience whether you design it or not.
When it’s designed, project delivery feels clear, coherent, and in control. When it’s not, it feels reactive, confusing, and misaligned.
Drawing from real-world project delivery, this session introduces a practical model you can use immediately to diagnose misalignment, reduce rework, and improve client clarity:
• The signals you track (and the ones you miss)
• The feedback loops you create through meetings, updates, and decisions
• And the narrative that helps teams and stakeholders make sense of the work
Together, these determine whether a project builds trust or erodes it.
Through two detailed case studies and hands-on exercises, you’ll learn how to redesign your delivery approach to create alignment, momentum, and trust in real time.
Jennifer Goebel
Jennifer Goebel is a Web Project Manager at Black Digital Group with over five years of agency experience leading website projects across a wide variety of industries.
She believes the most successful projects aren’t built on perfect processes—they’re built on people who feel genuinely seen, supported, and set up to do their best work. Drawing from her management of complex, multi-stakeholder projects, Jennifer has developed a people-first approach to delivery that turns team dynamics into a project’s greatest asset.
As an active member of The Digital Project Manager community, she has participated in creating content for members to grow and learn, gained new insights, and madelike-minded friends who love to nerd out about projects. Outside of work, Jennifer enjoys hiking in the mountains of East Tennessee and enjoying a good laugh over dinner with friends.
Presentation • Monday, October 19 • 3:00-3:45 PM
Managing Projects, Seeing People: Why Your Team's Experience Is Your Greatest Project Asset
As project managers, we know the most important part of any project is the people. Yet in the rush of deadlines, deliverables, and decisions, we often forget to intentionally design the one experience that drives everything else — the experience of our team.
In this session, Jennifer shares a fresh approach to project leadership drawn from real moments of leading, learning, and paying close attention to the people behind the work. When a project manager truly invests in knowing and valuing their team — where they are, what they bring, and what they need — something powerful happens. A team that feels genuinely seen, trusted, and supported doesn't just work well together — they naturally create quality experiences for the clients they serve.
At the end of this presentation, you'll walk away with:
• A new lens for designing a team experience built on trust and genuine connection
• Practical ways to see and honor what each person uniquely brings to the project
• Simple, immediate gestures that strengthen your team from the inside out and transform your client relationships as a result
Whether you're leading your first project or your fiftieth, this talk will remind you that your greatest project asset isn't your software or your process — it's your ability to truly see the people in front of you.
Kathryn Murphy
Kathryn (Kat) Murphy, PMP, is the Director of Operations at Orases, a custom software and AI solutions company she has called home for nearly 15 years.
Overseeing a team of project managers across every Orases engagement, Kat has spent the last few years guiding her team through one of the biggest shifts of her career: figuring out what project management looks like as AI rapidly reshapes roles, team sizes, and velocity. She believes the work of change management isn’t about forcing new tools on people; it’s about asking the right questions, keeping people genuinely invested as the ground shifts beneath them, and building processes that bend without breaking.
For Kat, the hard part of AI is never the technology; it’s helping people feel empowered through the change. Kat loves connecting with others who light up at the chance to talk shop about projects and processes.
She’s based in Maryland, where, when she’s not running operations and project management, she’s running after her two kids (and her husband), and rarely turning down a good laugh along the way.
Keynote • Tuesday, October 20 • 9:15-10:15 AM
The DPM's AI Skill Stack: What to Learn, What to Delegate, and What to Let Go
As DPMs, we've always been the ones absorbing change — new tools, new processes, new responsibilities that somehow land on our plates without ever leaving them. But AI is different. It's not just another tool to learn; it's quietly rewriting what our teams expect us to do. Suddenly we're prototyping, prompting, and shipping alongside the people we used to coordinate. So what does it mean to lead when the role itself is shifting under your feet?
In this session, we'll get honest about what's actually changing for DPMs, what's hype, and how to grow without burning out — or losing the parts of the job that make us essential. We'll talk about navigating skill shifts on your own team, helping your people through their own identity questions, and finding clarity on where the DPM role is heading next.
Whether you're feeling the pressure to keep up, or you're the one your team looks to for answers you don't quite have yet, this session will help you lead the change instead of just absorbing it.
Chase Williams
Chase Williams is a Senior AI Project Manager at KUNGFU.AI, a management consulting and engineering firm focused exclusively on artificial intelligence. He brings 17 years of leading projects across enterprise software, marketing, and product teams. His background includes everything from machine learning implementations to AI consulting for private equity firms.
He believes the most valuable thing a project manager brings is not simply the status reports and risk logs. It's judgment, empathy, taste, and the ability to see a project in a way no one else can. Working at an AI consultancy, Chase has spent the time putting that belief to the test, building AI agents and workflows that take on the busywork so PMs can focus on the human work that actually moves projects forward.
While away from his computer, Chase's interests span from running half marathons to creating mixes as a hobbyist DJ. He believes a well-rounded life makes a unique, effective project manager.
Lightning Talk • Tuesday, October 20 • 10:30-10:45 AM
Managing Projects, Orchestrating Teams: The PM's Shift in the Age of AI
Early in his career, a blunt question from a VP taught Chase Williams something that changed how he saw his job. "Why don't you speak up?" He had a perspective the team needed, but he was too buried in status reports, risk logs, and meeting notes to use it. For years, the busywork won.
What changed wasn't that Chase started caring more. It's that he stopped working alone. In this session, he shares how AI is quietly reshaping the project manager's role, not by replacing PMs, but by handing them a new kind of teammate to direct. The tasks that once buried us are being handed off to agents we orchestrate, freeing PMs to do the part that was always the real work: thinking deeply, reading the room, and bringing the one perspective no one else on the team can.
What you'll take away:
• Why the work AI automates was never where a PM's value lived, and what it actually is
• How keeping a human in the loop turns AI agents into teammates you direct, not tools that replace you
• A new way to see the PM role in the age of AI, from managing projects to orchestrating people and agents
Blythe Meyers
Blythe Meyers is a Seattle-based creative program manager and veteran performer of improv.
Rooted in the Pacific Northwest improvisation scene with groups like Quiet Monkey Fight and Unexpected Productions, Blythe applies the principles of improv to corporate agile methodologies.
Presentation • Tuesday, October 20 • 11:30 AM-12:15 PM
No Script, No Problem: How Improv Makes Better Project Managers
While project management is often associated with rigid timelines, Gantt charts, and strict methodologies, the reality of executing a project is rarely predictable. This speech explores how the foundational rules of improvisational theater offer a powerful, unexpected toolkit for project managers to navigate change, foster team collaboration, and drive successful outcomes.
This presentation will review how applying the core tenets of improv to daily project management workflows, leaders can shift their teams from a rigid "plan-and-execute" mindset to a dynamic "listen-and-adapt" culture.
Key Takeaways:
• The power of "yes, and..."
• Active listening over passive hearing
• Embracing "there are no mistakes, only gifts"
• Making your "scene partner" look good
Nick Cobb
Nick Cobb leads client and project success at Blend Interactive, a web strategy, design, and development firm in Sioux Falls, SD.
For over seven years, he's been the person who keeps digital projects moving—teams aligned, clients in the loop, deadlines intact. His approach is practical and people-first, turning big creative ideas into things that actually ship. Whether it's a children's hospital reimagining its website or a financial institution launching a new platform, Nick builds partnerships that last and delivers work that matters.
Presentation • Tuesday, October 20 • 3:00-3:45 PM
The Long Haul: How to Manage Delivery and the Relationship on Enterprise Web Projects
Most PM training prepares you to deliver projects. Nobody really prepares you to also be the relationship; but on long web projects, that's exactly what happens. Over 6+ months, the PM becomes the face of the agency, the keeper of context, and often the deciding factor in whether a client stays or comes back.
This session will be about what Nick has learned managing that dual role at Blend. He will walk through the unique pressures that long projects create — momentum erosion, stakeholder turnover, scope creep that compounds quietly on fixed-cost SOWs, and share a practical framework for managing delivery and the client relationship as two distinct, intentional responsibilities.
Attendees will leave with a clearer picture of when to put on which hat, how to spot relationship drift before it becomes a project risk, and how to have scope conversations that protect the work without damaging trust.
Crystal J. Richards MHA, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM
Crystal Richards is the founder of MindsparQ and author of PMP Exam Prep for Dummies®.
With more than 20 years of experience and 65,000+ professionals trained across the globe and across corporate, government, healthcare, and nonprofit environments, she has built a reputation for closing the gap between having a title and knowing how to lead.
A keynote speaker and workshop facilitator, her sessions are direct, energizing, and designed for audiences ready for an honest conversation about what it takes to move work forward
Keynote • Tuesday, October 20 • 4:00-4:45 PM
Recess for Grown-Ups: Why Your Best Project Thinking Happens When You Stop Working
Most project managers learn early that their value lives in availability, which means staying reachable and responsive even when the work and their own judgment are telling them to stop. What looks like dedication from the outside often produces worse decisions, weaker creative thinking, and the kind of low-grade exhaustion that becomes someone's whole personality before they notice it happened.
This session argues that recess, structured and unapologetic, isn't a self-care indulgence dressed up in a friendlier word. It's a performance practice that the best project leaders treat the way serious athletes treat recovery. This talk makes the case that the project managers doing the strongest work over time are not grinding harder than everyone else. They're recovering on purpose.
Register Now!
Member Price : $1,150
Nonmember Price : $1,650
Teams of 4 or more receive a
$200 discount per ticket!
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