Maybe some of us have been there. Maintaining/killing legacy features/products which should have taken a few weeks but starts to take longer. Long enough to impact your learning goals, and growth. How did you stay motivated on the job during and after those times? Question applies to PMs working on smaller/ slightly less significant features/ internal tools and platforms too.
Thanks that’s a very thoughtful response.
Been there too. Based on your description, it sounds like an EOL project, but I can't really tell what kind of product management work is actually required. Do you have project/program managers at PayPal? If so, can you offload some of the less strategic pieces their way to manage? As to how to stay motivated, since you didn't say what motivates you personally, it's hard to say. However one possibility is to start to allocate some time to work on the next phases of the product after the current project is done - > product vision and longer-term roadmap so you're less immersed in the day-to-day grind. If the vision is compelling enough, it might also encourage folks to think of the current grunt work as something that's temporarily painful but is in service of something larger and more important to the company (or the industry or your users etc). From a communications perspective, if you can socialize that vision effectively outside the team, it becomes easier to portray short-term challenges as minor setbacks that don't have a real effect on the things that really matter.