Working in IT Project Management in Nepal: What's Actually Changed

I've spent my career so far in Kathmandu's IT and telecom scene — from an internship at Nepal Telecom, through QA and project engineering, into Scrum Mastering and now product management. A few honest observations from that path, for anyone considering a similar one here.

The demand for structured delivery has clearly grown

When I started as a QA engineer, a lot of teams I worked with were running projects informally — deadlines set by whoever shouted loudest in a meeting, requirements captured in someone's notebook, no real backlog to speak of. Over the past several years, that's shifted noticeably. More companies here are explicitly running Scrum or Kanban, using Jira and Confluence as a default rather than an exception, and hiring specifically for Agile facilitation skills rather than expecting a developer to absorb the role informally.

Part of that is global — Agile adoption has become close to universal across industries worldwide, not just in software. But locally, I think it's also driven by more Nepali companies delivering directly for international clients, where the client already expects sprint reports, velocity tracking, and proper ceremonies as a baseline, not a bonus.

The gap is less about tools, more about seniority

Most teams here know the vocabulary — sprints, standups, retros, story points. What's rarer is someone senior enough to actually coach a team through a real conflict, or push back on a stakeholder demanding an unrealistic deadline. I've watched plenty of "Scrum Masters" here who are really just meeting schedulers, because nobody trained them past the ceremony layer, and nobody above them modeled what real facilitation looks like. That's an opportunity, honestly — the people who invest in the coaching and conflict-resolution side of the role stand out fast, precisely because it's still uncommon.

Compensation is improving but still trails global remote rates

This is the uncomfortable one to write about, but it's true: a PM or Scrum Master role at a Nepal-based company still tends to pay meaningfully less than an equivalent remote role for an international company, even accounting for cost of living. That gap is a big part of why so many capable people I've worked with eventually pivot toward remote positions with overseas employers, or leave the country outright. I don't think there's an easy fix for that from where I sit, but it's worth naming honestly rather than pretending the market is purely merit-based.

Where I think this is heading

I expect the local demand for genuinely skilled Agile practitioners — not just certificate holders — to keep growing, particularly as more Nepali IT firms take on delivery work for clients who already expect mature Agile practice. The people who'll do well are the ones who go past the vocabulary and actually build the harder skills: real facilitation, real stakeholder negotiation, real comfort delivering bad news. That was true globally before AI entered the conversation, and if anything, it's become more true since — the mechanical parts of the job are what's easiest to automate or outsource; the trust-based parts aren't.