Lean quarter. How to be useful?
I recently joined Walmart as a PM with 5+ YOE at 220k TC. I had offers from Amazon, and several other startups, but I chose WM primarily because of the area of work + better leveling + remote work I was offered. I'm kind of regretting already. One of the initiatives I was assigned to lead (and I was super excited about!) has been pushed out to the next quarter because of lack of engineering resources. Essentially, in the current quarter I am supposed to utilise the time for research and KT from another PM until resources free up. I'm also seeing my team is hiring a lot more PMs and I'm not sure how that's going to be helpful without enough engineering counterpart. I'm feeling pretty bummed about this. One, I am not going to have any immediate impact (which was promised during my interview) and two, I feel it makes it unfair for performance evaluation. How do you manage to be useful during lean periods? If you're a PM at Walmart, how has it been for you? Do you suggest I wait until a promo before I look outside? #tech #productmanagement
In every big company this will definitely happen many times. It could also be you start a new project, it’s super interesting and you work very hard on it, but a month or two later they change their minds, can the project and you have to work on something else. I’d say that’s even worse than what you’re describing, and it happened to me few times at G
Leave? Not out of anger or anything, just out of boredom. Ever watch office space? Good things happen when you tell the higher ups that you’re just bored and unmotivated because the work is lacking
Recharge, brother. Build up stamina for when things pick up. You are remote- do some travelling, pick up a hobby. WMT is not going anywhere, so you need to focus on you before things get hectic.
You work for a big company. This will happen. Don’t worry so much about this quarter. Focus on how you me project can be 10-100x bigger in 3-5 years.