About · Senior Project Manager · Toronto

I'm Akshat Shah. This is the longer version.

The rest of this site shows the work. This page is the part the work leaves out—where I came from, what I lead now, and what I've come to believe about getting complicated things delivered.

6+Years in digital delivery

20+Cross-functional specialists

98%Client satisfaction

The plain facts / 01

Who this is.

If you arrived here by searching my name, this is the sentence you were looking for.

My name is Akshat Shah. I am a Senior Project Manager at Merkle | Cardinal Path, based in Toronto, Canada. I hold the PMP® and CSM certifications, and I have spent 6+ years in digital delivery.

The rest is context. I lead analytics, martech, and transformation programs for enterprise clients—the kind with many owners, long dependency chains, and no natural place for the whole picture to sit. My work is to be that place.

Now / 02

What I lead.

I joined Merkle in October 2025. My current client portfolio is Amgen and GNC. At Amgen I lead the CDP transformation and the CI communications project: migration readiness, dependencies, stakeholder alignment, and the decisions that keep both moving.

Separately, I manage a distinct Amplitude product across multiple client partners. It is a product, not a program, and the difference matters. One operating model, one release rhythm, several partners with priorities of their own. Scope sits at $1M+, and the work runs through 20+ cross-functional specialists.

The Amgen CDP transformation and the Amplitude operating model each have their own case study.

Before / 03

How I got here.

I was at Havas CX Canada from March 2022 to October 2025. I started in operations—the unglamorous side of a PMO, where you learn how delivery actually behaves once a plan meets a real week—and later held the project manager role.

Those years covered enterprise delivery across telecom, financial services, travel, and professional services: a $4M+ portfolio and 15+ major releases, with clients including TELUS, KPMG, Home Hardware, Manulife, SCENE+, PNC Bank, and G Adventures. It is where my numbers come from—98% client satisfaction, budgets held to ±5% variance.

It is also where I learned that most delivery problems are decision problems wearing a schedule as a disguise.

What I hold to / 04

Three ideas that carry the rest.

Legible, operable, real. Everything else I do is downstream of those three.

Legible

Outcome, constraints, ownership and open decisions, written down where everyone can see them. Ambiguity is not a permanent condition of complex programs. It is a gap, and someone has to close it.

Operable

A rhythm people can actually use will beat a document nobody opens. Prioritization only works when it is visible—stated out loud, not inferred weeks later from who got the hours.

Real

The last ten percent is real work: quality, readiness, the checks nobody gets credit for. Programs rarely come apart at the start. They come apart in the final stretch, quietly, while everyone assumes someone else is watching.

On my own time / 05

Things I build.

I found my own work more interesting once I started making things end to end. Oddly Okay is a graphic apparel brand. TridentCX is a strategy and delivery consultancy. SecureNest is a home-security service. Relay is a browser extension for private bookmark sync.

None of these are decorative. Running a small thing yourself—brand, storefront, fulfillment, support—keeps me honest about what I ask of a team. It is easier to be reasonable about a deadline after owning every part of one.

Where to find me / 06

Bring me the messy part.

The useful message is the one with the actual problem in it, not the tidied version of the problem.