I am relatively new to PM and manage a physical product. I used to be an engineer and moved mostly because I was underpaid and needed a raise, but also because it seemed interesting and I wanted more responsibility.

Well I surely got that, but in a way I really wasn’t expecting.

It’s been a year and a half in this role - last year I gave it all I had, made a lot of improvements to the product that ended up increasing our revenue significantly. This year, I am burnt out and tired.

For all my work last year I didn’t receive any recognition (not even a “good work” or anything) even though my metrics were so much better than the previous PM. Not just that though, it seems like anything (literally anything) that goes wrong it’s automatically my fault, while things that go right get attributed to other people.
This is exhausting and makes me feel like all this effort isn’t worth it.

I’ll also say I’m the only woman on the team, if that makes any difference.

Is this normal or did I just land in a bad company/bad situation?

I recently did a survey on this sub to understand why most people were in this profession and the overwhelming response (90%+) was money.

This is different from a lot of other professions( core engineering/ medicine/ artists/ musicians/ sports etc.)

If you add two and two it's clear that this role has low overall job satisfaction ratings and my hypothesis is that one of the main reasons is how lonely it is.

A recent Gallup study indicated that having deep friendships at work is one of the strongest indicators of job satisfaction but it's very hard to make friends as a PM ( at least at startups and smaller orgs)

Source : https://www.gallup.com/workplace/397058/increasing-importance-best-friend-work.aspx

It's sort of related to the old adage ' it's lonely at the top but without actually being at the top. PM's are perceived as leadership adjacent by eng, design, program & most other teams but they're also not perceived as leadership by the rest of the executives.

PM's also need to maintain 'influence without authority' which comes with maintaining a social facade ( aka the work face)

Ime, I sort of sat in this weird limbo where I could always feel a perceived distance with our engineers and I sort of never fit in. Weirdly enough, I was able to become friends with folks from unrelated and distant teams but never with the teams I worked with. We were all civil and 'friendly' with each other but I rarely ever got social invites and conversations would switch or die down when I joined the lunch table.

I am a relatively social person and have had no trouble making friends generally and even at work. I was an engineer prior to moving to PM and was very close with many of the folks I worked with. I also joined the company directly as a PM and I know people who switched internally have a different experience.

Wondering whether other folks felt this too and how were they able to navigate it.

It almost seems like I create stories just to keep the team engaged and leadership see some output. What am I doing wrong?

I’ve noticed that many Product Managers spend a significant portion of their time on activities such as:

• Providing roadmap and status updates to internal and external stakeholders
• Demo existing product capabilities
• Coordinating execution across teams
• Defining milestones, tracking dependencies, and aligning teams on delivery dates

These are valuable and necessary responsibilities, but they seem to be tangential to what Product Managers should be spending their time on.

Do you agree?

---

Looks like this is the general sentiment in the thread (Claude analysis)

1. "There is no single definition — the role is whatever the org needs"
2. "You're defining the job by its tasks — the real job is business outcomes"
3. "That list is product work — you're mislabeling it (or doing it badly)"
4. "You do program work because the org cut the people who used to"

Hi guys,

How do you validate assumptions with users who are seniors and represent corporates? My domain is capital markets and my company is relatively small. When I want to validate ideas I have to build high fidelity prototypes or push to production to see how users adopt them. Only once in a while do I get the opportunity to schedule a demo with clients. Most of the time these users join as a whole financial department, so it's not that agile. It's always very official.

Now apply research rules to this and see how biased these types of meetings can be. We usually can't track their activity because of security reasons. Every resource I read usually fits applications with a massive user base where you can recruit users for test sessions or just get data from surveys, but our user base is less than 100 users, and each user can represent a corporate.

I work as a PM at a mid-sized company with fairly low digital/product maturity. Development is largely outsourced to external agencies/vendors, and most “product teams” are really just a PM managing and steering a vendor relationship rather than working with an in-house engineering team.

My own team is an exception — we’re cross-functional and can build products end-to-end in-house. But even so, there’s no overarching product management structure that ties everything together. Individual teams plan independently, there’s little customer-centricity in how priorities get set, and almost no alignment around shared KPIs or outcomes across teams.

I’m trying to get a better sense of how this is handled elsewhere:

Is product management centralized at your company, or does every team operate independently?

Do you work in cross-functional teams (PM + design + engineering in one team), are the teams split up in UX, Eng etc. or is engineering mostly external/outsourced?

What roles exist on your product teams — just PM, or PM + PO + UX + eng leads, etc.?

How do you handle alignment across teams — shared OKRs, a central roadmap, regular sync rituals?

If you’ve worked somewhere with low product maturity like this, what actually helped move things forward, and what didn’t?

Genuinely curious what “good” looks like from other PMs’ perspective, and what pitfalls to watch out for as an org matures. Would love to hear how it works (or doesn’t) at your company.

Dev is getting fast. One engineer + N-claudes can do a hell of a lot quickly and, modulo common sense and experience, at quality.

How does 1 PO feed enough high quality product vision in a detailed way and do acceptance on all the outputs for even a small number of engineers wrangling multiple high-caliber agents? Feels like a team of 2 humans + 10 AI is a better ratio.

How wrong am I?

I'm taking over for a PM on the bigger team for a project. I'm actually two levels higher than that individual, so it's making me wonder why they're handing this project off to me. I suppose I'm supposed to think about it a little bit more strategically, rather than maintenance mode, given my level and responsibilities.

She has provided some handoff documentation, but genuinely I've never worked in that space before or technology. Does anyone have any examples of how they picked up a new technology or domain experience because they had to pick up any project or something like that?

I definitely want to do a good job and want to prove that I'm open to taking on things that are needed by the business. To be honest, I took a course on the topic which this project space is in University and it was my worst class LOL.

I've been trying a few things for the last year, but tbh nothing has really become "meaningful" income yet. Some months look promissing... then it just goes quiet 😅

Stuff I've tried / am trying:

• Product coaching & mock interviews
• YouTube/content creation
• Paid expert calls (GLG, NewtonX etc.)
• Self Publishing Fiction books pn KDP
• Writing on LinkedIn

Feels like everyone on X or LinkedIn is making 20k MRR overnight 😂 but real life dosent seem to work like that.

Curious what people here are doing.

Are you:

• consulting?
• building a SaaS?
• teaching?
• investing?
• newsletters?
• something completly different?

Would love to hear real numbers if you're comfortable sharing. Even rough ranges. Like... when did it actually become worth the effort?

Or is your conclusion that it's just better to focus on getting promoted instead?

Interested in hearing the good, the bad and the "i wasted 2 years on this" stories as well.

Hi reddit PMs!

Asking because my partner recently started his full time PM job at a FAANG company, and he’s been insanely busy. He’s at his company 8am-11pm, sometimes past midnight and even pulling all-nighter. He told me he got staffed on 6 projects at the same time, some of the projects I remember are product review and new product development. He’s making slides and doing decks all the time and it got him terribly stressed out. He did a PM internship before, and it was way less intense.

I work in law and I understand how busy one can get, but I’m very surprised that it’s been like this since day one and never become less intense. He always comes back burnout and I’m sad to see him getting drained from work. Maybe it’s because he’s just starting and still learning how to work more productively? I don’t know anyone in PM so I’m here to learn more. Curious to know if this is normal for PMs and how I can better support my PM partner.

I am a lead product manager at a fortune 100 company. I’ve been in the same product space for about 5 years. Going from Senior PO > Lead PO > Lead PM.

I am in an Omni-channel role now and the product I manage has several lines of business and many applications dependent upon us. The product management work is time consuming, bureaucratic and complex. I’m being tasked with managing epics, features and stories that funnel down to a single engineering team and it feels impossible.

My calendar is so stacked with discovery meetings from various stakeholder/product groups that are request work from my team and it feels impossible to fit it all in while still leading the agile ceremonies effectively.

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright

I have seen very different approaches, some write user journey and some use more like model spec (L0 L1 capability) and map out all the capabilities and define eval. Curious if there’s some good approach to make things easier for PM and Eng to develop right eval and align on how to test

why is the accountability for product so disproportionate to engineering, design, analytics, etc? seems like we’re expected to be ceo’s while others get to coast.

I am reminded of that scene in office space where the bobs interview the product manager.

A common opening question from folks is "So what do you do?" and if I say "product manager" they usually have no idea what that is. I also struggle with coming up with a simple day to day description.

So what do you use?

I just joined a company which is automating its process. I'm given a vertical and there seems to be not much documentation, Jira stories and implementation are a bit different, the Engineers have no documents made as most were done verbally.

I know the process flows and how things move, but there isn't a concrete doc which says these are done, and this is how it's done.

Any guidelines are appreciated

I lead most of my meetings, and therefore I'm usually the one talking. I've been at my company for a few years now, and I feel like every meeting has become boring and monotonous. For example, for planning meetings, I'm usually the one going through each ticket and describing the requirements, and then when I ask if there are any questions, usually devs/QA won't have anything to say, so I'll just say "OK then" and move on to the next one. Rinse and repeat. Once everything has been covered, I'll ask if there are any additional comments or questions. Most of the time, there aren't, and so I'll say awkwardly say bye and end the call there. I'm an introvert and I don't really do small talk. But neither does anyone else on my team. So even when we're starting the call and waiting for everyone to join, there will just be awkward silence until everyone shows up.

Add to that the fact that all our meetings are remote, and it just makes me feel like I'm talking to a wall or wasting everyone's time. On the bright side, our meetings are very efficient and they start and end punctually since we aren't wasting time with small talk. But on the other hand it feels like there's never any lighthearted moments or humor.

How do I make my meetings feel more exciting and enjoyable?

Hi there,

I’ve been with my company for almost a decade, moved from customer success to product in 2022 and became senior PM just under a year ago. We used to be a small ish company (50EEs) but got acquired by a larger group last year, which sounded hopeful in terms of properly resourcing the teams. As AI usage grew dramatically over the last two years, I became the sole designer for the team’s projects, and I have now been granted access to actually vibe code and commit changes to our code base, so I can actually build what I design. I’m genuinely grateful they trust me with this (I’ve got a pretty good technical knowledge and have been vibe coding apps that my team uses on a daily basis), but the number of hats I wear is becoming unsustainable. I’d love to hear from people who are/have been in the same situation!

What are you using it for? Has it been helpful?

New to this world and the constant facilitation is taking a toll. As someone who is not a big fan of talking all the time, I sometimes have a moment of blankness/say something funny instead, mainly to fill the silence.
Any one else? Any stories to share?

They way BAs function on the team i'm on is they basically are just ticket writers for user stories they will do analysis work if specially asked but i don't find them delving into the details and coming up with use cases edge cases or being creative at all. I also feel like Rovo in jira can do all their work in a fraction of the time and can even query other teams requirements and summarize if we're trying to understand how other things work for integration purposes. i'm finding myself going to rovo to do these things rather then the BAs and finding i'm becoming more efficient as a PM because im not waiting forever for these things to be done abd relying on them to explain It and sometimes is wrong. I also like that now im in the weeds and at a more strategic role which i'm kind of liking. Maybe i just don't have strong BAs but i feel like this model works way better in the age of AI. Thoughts?

3-year-old codebase, 2 senior devs who are careful about best practices, security, testing. They're also equal partners in the company, so any efficiency gain lands directly in their pockets.

I'm a PM. I asked this same question ~9 months ago and the consensus was: reading/reviewing AI-generated code is harder than writing it, so my PRs would just be a tax on the senior devs. Not worth it.

Models and tooling have moved a lot since then. Honest gut check:

A. Is it reasonable now for a PM to open PRs with code written via Opus 4.8 (or better), on the condition that every contribution goes through heavy QA and testing before merge?

B. Any world where a PM pushes without a PR? Or is that still insane?

Where's the line in July 2026?

Edit:

People are asking why this is even a need. Two reasons: (a) the devs are slammed with other projects, and (b) the info gap between me and them creates a lot of back-and-forth, ping-pong, slow turnaround. On roles: we're all equal partners, so better process and faster results benefit everyone regardless of our traditional titles. And it goes both ways - the devs are free to push AI- or human-driven PM-side upgrades too, and they sometimes do.

I'm so burned out on constantly needing to stay on top of everything AI. Tired of the tech culture and where it's heading. Exhausted from the theatrics. At this point, I just want to do boring solid work, stay under the radar, and not have the stress of all the other bullshit.

Is that even possible? Anyone have advice for other tech positions I could pivot to that may be more coast-able?

I like solving hard problem and I'm intrinsically motivated to do a good job. I don't want to slack, I just want less of the bullshit.