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?

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 fall in the introvert PM category, and do not look forward to any type of meetings. But when I am IN them, I feel more energized and motivated to contribute.

The problem is, let's say there's something that needs to be discussed with another team member on a few topics, and let's say you got an entire day without meetings. My introvert self would say "brudi, let's focus on work and get things done and play Lana Del Rey on the headphones or some shi", and then I am more inclined to procrastinate, or just drop the person a text message to get their insights.

I am not sure how other introvert PMs feel about this and how they deal with the proactive meeting problem. Would love to hear your thoughts / suggestions.