What do you dislike about your job, as a product manager??
The astonishing amount of bullshit and red tape I have to wade through to get things to customers. Some days I wish I could just sit at my keyboard and code.
When sales folks are too incompetent to show/demo your product, so you have to jump in a lot more calls with customers than you should, and have to be a solution engineer for the day because of it
Make a video/write a doc that helps them do it on their own. Give them talking points if you need to. Teach them how to fish rather than give them a fish.
Yah done all that. Even held monthly product training sessions demoing features and the platform. Doesn’t happen all the time, usually when the sales person didn’t take the time to actually study the product and needs my help to close the sale (and get their commission)
PM ends up as the catch all for everything. Especially in Amazon. If it’s not an SDE task must be PM!
So many unqualified pm ruined the reputation of a function
Every person’s bullshit. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one incentivized to make the product successful. Other people just complain about issues, like actually, some people I work with are constantly just complaining instead of just doing shit with the compromises in place. Lack of trust from other disciplines, despite being a top performer. The insane amount of questions, many of which aren’t actually that important.
Preach
The red tape in the organization. Any decision takes tons of iterations. Engineers who treat their team’s PM like some “other”. At PayPal the culture is such that the engineering team thinks of themselves as one team and the PM is a plus one. Doesn’t bother most folks much as they focus on their output but it’s there. No “one team” behavior BS is true
I’ve lived both sides of this one. Currently back in development. Dislikes: - when Dev straight up lies to you. - the politics. Letting every grandstanding fuck have his say or else they kill your project out of spite. - the evening and weekend meetings. - “blamestorming” whenever someone’s got an axe to grind. Most of all: when it’s made crystal clear to you that the real stars of the show are Engineering and sales, and that you keep them happy, product be damned. Honestly, I’ve no idea why anyone wants to be a PM, aside from it’s a place for MBAs to go and feel important and visible.
Spot on
Some darkness here... Let me bring the half full glass 1/ we are the punching bag and we get all the questions and we are asked to be on all the random calls we don't need to be on because we are the center of - how it works - why it is that way - what are the reasons it is not something other way - what comes next - what went wrong across the entire pipleline 2/ everything not X is us because we are the only ones that don't really own "just" one stage in the pipeline. ENG owns building g it, sales selling it, support answering support tickets, but only we tract the product from idea to how much $ or usage it gets. So we _are_ invloved and hence relevant no matter what is the question or issue. 3/ eng love us or hate us as a function of how usful we are to them doing thier job (which btw, we gave then the work), and how successful we help them become (by giving them work that matters to the company and hence in a healthy company to their personal success). Yes there are bad things like stress, maybe not always carring to be that center and just what do do your "smaller" job (let someone tell me what to do). I am not saying it is a pink unicorn job, but not sure the reasons mentioned above make sense.
I wholly agree it has to be done. More power to people who thrive in the role. I simply didn’t.
Politics.
Insecurity and try hard to create a space. And that the engineers might take over.