Product managers are universally hated for not delivering, making excuses, and wrong features. Balancing conflicting stakeholder interests is a tough job. Explore challenges in product management and transforming hurdles into growth opportunities.
Being a product manager is an incredibly challenging role requiring balancing conflicting demands from various stakeholders.
Negative perceptions about product managers can be leveraged for personal and professional growth by turning criticism into motivation and seeking consistency.
Deep dives
Challenges in Product Management
Product management is portrayed as an immensely challenging role where product managers are often disliked for various reasons. The podcast emphasizes that PMs struggle to balance conflicting demands from different stakeholders, such as addressing scalability issues while limiting expenses, resolving usability issues without affecting velocity, and aligning with varied customer needs. The role is described as fraught with complexities, leading to frustration, resentment, and difficulties in meeting expectations.
Reasons for Discontent Among Teams
The podcast delves into the specific reasons why different teams, including engineers, designers, customer-facing teams, sales reps, and marketing teams, harbor disdain towards product managers. Engineers find PMs frustrating due to vague requirements and unrealistic timelines, while designers feel undervalued and misunderstood. Customer support teams face challenges due to slow responses and unreliable product functionality. Sales reps struggle to sell products with missing features, and marketing teams face difficulties in promoting outdated solutions.
Transforming Disapproval into Productive Feedback
Despite the negative depiction of product managers, the podcast highlights the opportunity to leverage criticism for personal and professional growth. It suggests turning animosity into motivation to excel by understanding the root causes of dislike, managing expectations, and seeking consistency. By reframing negative emotions into constructive actions and learning from adversity, product managers can navigate challenges better and use criticism as a catalyst for improvement.
Product managers are almost universally hated — and with (good?) reason. They just don’t get it. They make a lot of excuses. They never deliver, and when they do, it’s the wrong feature. And don’t get me started on how poorly they iterate, descope, estimate, roadmap, and “prioritize” their “backlog”.
Being a PM is an almost impossible job by definition. You’re supposed to somehow keep all these disparate sets of people happy, and they all want different things. Not just different — sometimes the exact opposite.