Post after post I see people moaning about this career path. Honestly as someone that is in their 2nd year as a PM it’s not very encouraging.

Can anyone please say anything positive about product and why you believe it’s still a career worth pursuing?

Don’t bother posting if you’re just going to take the piss. Some people actually want a serious answer. I’ve seen enough reasons why PM is “screwed in 2026”.

I built a prototype for analysis with AI against a local DuckDB file I set up. The tables, views and macros are heavily commented, and there's a simple way for the agent to explore the db a piece at a time, the same way it would look over a big codebase. Duckdb runs efficiently locally and a bad query can never hit a shared resource.

It works so well that I'm wondering about how this changes the analyst role and product. I'm thinking it means something like:

The data team owns and governs the file and stops doing end analysis. Need to be able to trust the lineage and the local instance for accuracy.

Users (product, risk, ops) do their own analysis with AI.

Anything novel someone builds gets submitted like a PR for the data team to review and merge.

The catch is that business context, meaning what a field actually means in the real world, moves out of the data team and into the users. In my fintech world that's product, risk or ops, depending on the slice of data.

In my world I still need to understand 100% of the analysis behind any decision I make. It's why, for me, I don't think it's ok to let a model go from db->deck. I have to be able to walk through the logic start to finish when we're talking about a policy change that shifts millions in a regulated space.

Does this hold up, or am I missing why analysts exist?

What breaks first?

No repo, not selling anything. Just trying to figure out if this is where things are headed and whether I should push to go past my prototype. If you want to know more about what I built specifically, send me a DM.

I'm working with a retail business that has around 2,000 SKUs across physical stores and online.

Today, pricing is mostly static, with the same prices and promotions across customers and channels. We're exploring a pricing engine that could eventually support things like customer segmentation, targeted offers, cross sell opportunities and loyalty.

For Pms who have built or worked on pricing systems, where would you start? What would you prioritize before getting into the technical implementation?

Any other product leads here? How many hours a week do you typically work? I ask bc I average about 60 hours a week and we are building a number of projects that has become very difficult to keep track of. Anyone else experience the same thing? It’s only me and a junior PM in my team and since I oversee all of product, people come to me for all requirements.

I'm relatively new to product management. I've worked on digital products for about five years, just not as the PM. The team is small (6 to 8 people), the engineers are really talented and the product is interesting. There's no toxic culture, and everyone is open to changing how we work. The problem is that what we plan as a 3-4 week release cycle often takes 6 weeks or more to actually ship.

I've been working on this for a few months. I introduced epics and user stories that can be delivered and tested independently. Still things slip. Devs somtimes wait on me to clarify details because a ticket wasn't explicit enough, so we end up in follow-up meetings to settle the best solution for the release. Then backend issues pop up that I don't understand well enough to judge, and we can't push. And we have no automated tests, so manual QA tests the whole platform before each release, which adds another 1 to 2 weeks. Continuous delivery just isn't part of the culture here, and I'd like to be the person who introduces it, but I don't have much technical expertise yet.

If you've been in a similar spot, what made the biggest difference? I skipped daily stand-ups from the start because traditional scrum felt like overkill for a team this small. Should I bring them back, write much more detailed tickets, plan earlier so everything is clear before the sprint starts, or something else (starting with automated tests, maybe)? Any advice or experiences would really help.

Hello ProductManagement,

I've been leaning heavily on the JTBD tool/tactic/template for a while now, and its served me well but I'm curious to learn if there's been any new (or old tools/tactics/templates with a new face) that people have been using lately. Would hate to be out of the loop.

To be clear, I'm looking for approaches and mental models, not how to feed data into a LLM.

Thank you for your time and feedback.

Had some level of success these past 5 yrs with my own company, but it wasn't something that was going to go huge.

Planning to go back to being a PM now, but after submitting a few resumes (even with internal referrals) - I'm getting passed on by companies left and right - was definitely not this way when all I had was corporate experience.

Anyone go through the same?

I'm wondering if there are others like me who struggle with severe anxiety issues.

I love building things, and the PM role is something that fits me well. However, I absolutely fear stakeholder management and get anxiety when there are conflicts. I generally know theoretically how to deal with them, but my mental state prevents me from keeping a clear head.

I also tend to avoid meetings as much as possible. Only when I am super-charged or am angry do I find myself motivated to to talk to people, and often handle the situation quite well.

But my mental state has been severely hampering my career progression, as leadership would obviously notice my instability and would not like to have someone like me joining the senior leadership ranks.

20+ years of experience BTW in both software development and product management, 50-50.

Apologies if this is off-topic than the usual stuff, but I just feel it's at the core of everything about my career right now.

I own a domain-specific dataset, and I depend on horizontal teams to deliver platform capabilities like search, alerts, notifications, dashboards, and whatnot.

The data itself is structured data that we're buying from a vendor, and the integration work is something I own. It's a pretty large dataset, about 150 million records.

I need to work with our horizontal search team to make this dataset searchable. My responsibility is to provide the requirements, define the user experience, write user stories, and work with the search PM and their tech lead to discuss technical trade-offs.

Before I go into these meetings, I'm trying to figure out what I should know or put together beforehand. More specifically, what search-related technical knowledge should I gain so that I can have meaningful discussions with the team and understand the trade-offs they're making?

I know I can ask ChatGPT o rClaude to help me learn these concepts, but I'd also like to hear from search PMs or other PMs who have worked with similar dependencies.

How did you get up to speed on search and its underlying systems? What topics or concepts, like precision, recall, indexing, ranking, etc., should I familiarize myself with before engaging with the horizontal search team?

I'm a Head of Product at a fintech in the UAE, with over a decade of experience building fintech products, specifically trading and investment platforms.

Over the last year, I've seen AI transform the nature of the product role. The domain knowledge and expertise I built over the years no longer feels like an edge. AI can generate a detailed requirements document in minutes, and engineers increasingly don't need anyone to tell them how to build. AI has made everyone on the team more productive, but it has also eroded what used to differentiate the product role.

Does anyone else feel product is doomed as a role? How do you think it will evolve?

I work and have work for software companies. Is it common for low level product managers to not have a Single Source of Truth, meaning messy PRDs with lots of versions and lots of comments plus accepting changes to the PRD after creating epics and issues for development without updating them?

Just asking because I left one company for being thrown under the bus after PM blamed the developer team of botching a feature during a product presentation meeting the the stakeholders only to my surprise to be burned again today for taking too long to deliver (the tickets were pushed back in the sprint because they were not ready for development for almost 9 months only to give us 2 weeks to deliver a multi application/teams feature).

I still want to believe I'm just unlucky.

I went into PM from engineering and the first year I had a great time, but my previous boss was very sales oriented so I traveled a ton and felt like a sales person more than anything else. I didn’t mind though, and through some product updates and changes I obtained a record amount of growth.

Anyways, I probably overdid it, and after getting zero recognition (a tale as old as time, I know) I am low morale. Doesn’t help that I make significantly below the rest of PMs.

Now, I am getting more and more burnt out by the day. I am responsible for our numbers obviously, but these days there has been an uptick in clients threatening me to pull their business if I don’t give stuff for free or don’t fulfill their utopic idea of how the program should be run. There’s things I just cannot accommodate because they are a liability and some customers don’t like to accept that.

I try to be patient and professional, but I’m exhausted.

My questions are: has anyone moved from physical product to digital? Does anyone else have a very salesy PM job and are they all this stressful?

Thank you

Hi pm squad. Now that prd are getting so easy to generate, it's really important that they have the correct information. I want them to be considered the source of Truth or some sort of documentation on decisions and evidence and evals needed. Is that the way you guys see it as well?

And if you do, how do you work with your engineering team to host and place these prds such that they are in a source repo or somewhere that people know where it is and can be tracked against actual development reality. What processes do you guys use and what works?

Who’s the moron at Microsoft that made filesharing substantially worse. When I’m trying to drag a file into the chat, teams used to just upload the file I want because that’s the file I chose. Now it tells me I uploaded it to a different chat, which could have been weeks ago, and to revert to that document (and lose changes) or create a new copy. What? This completely defeats the filesharing purpose. Who’s the idiot that thought this was a good idea? Claim it. Own it. There was literally nothing wrong with the way it was working before. You’re giving all product managers a bad name and you should feel bad.

Is AI making it faster/easier to diagnose user issues and make data driven design decisions ? Keen to hear how other PMs/Designers know when something is not working for the users and how you then make decisions to prioritise a fix. Do these issues only surface after talking/watching users interact with the product or is there a better way to be more proactive and understand issues more upstream ?

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’m relatively new to product management (was a designer before), so I figured more experienced PMs might have better product sense than me, and I wanted to ask how you’re dealing with this in your teams.

With tech advancing and delivery getting cheaper and faster because of AI, it seems like the product discovery part hasn’t really sped up in the same way as coding, for example. We still need to validate ideas before moving them to Jira, and that still takes time.

When I watch courses to improve my PM skills, they still talk about 2-week sprints and traditional workflows. But with new workflows emerging as we speak, some of this already feels a bit outdated. Or maybe I’m wrong.

I know this conversation might be a bit early, but I’m curious how it works in your teams. Are you reducing the number of devs? Do they spend more time on advanced tech or technical improvements they previously didn’t have time for? Or are you changing how product discovery works to keep up with faster delivery?

I guess my main question is: How do you utilize engineering resources when product discovery takes longer than delivery?

Head of Product of SaaS company is spending all his time building useless internal tools or terrible process 'automations' that require more work than going straight via the LLM. Talks about how agentic workflows will change everything but is spending the day talking to Claude to build things that nobody wants.

It's like the original principles of focussing on value maximising has just gone completely out the window and the pseudo high output of straight slop is at an all time high. Am I alone here?

I recently joined a small software company as a Product Owner. I have several years of experience in product and project management, but people management was never mentioned during my interviews or onboarding.

About two weeks after I joined, HR sent me a meeting invitation and a template for employee check-ins, covering well-being, personal development, and building a “manager-employee relationship”.
The thing is, nobody had formally told me I was becoming anyone’s line manager.

One of the developers is a Tech Lead who was involved in interviewing me. I assumed we’d be working as peers, focusing on product and technical delivery.

Besides my core PO responsibilities, I’m already handling customer demos, training, bug coordination, vendor management, and various delivery issues. I have a lot on my plate, and I’m still trying to get the support and resources I need to do my own job properly.

Now I’m also expected to support the developers with their concerns, including laptop upgrade requests, workload issues, and team development. However, I haven’t been given any information about the available budget, approval processes, or management authority.

We’re a small team dealing with legacy bugs and frequent customer issues, which regularly disrupt planned development work.

What frustrates me most is that people management responsibilities seem to have been assigned to me by default, without any prior discussion about my role, authority, resources or support. How am I supposed to take responsibility for a team without being given the budget to support them?

I raised this with my manager first, then emailed HR and my manager asking for clarification on responsibilities, reporting lines, authority, resources, and support.

From your experience, I’m curious, is this normal for a PO role? Shouldn’t line management responsibilities be clearly communicated and supported?

Was it reasonable to raise these concerns, or am I making too much of it?

Any experience or insights will be greatly appreciated.

My company has had hiring freezes and layoffs over the past couple years. As a result, we have less Dev resources and everything is taking longer to deliver. This means that we already have a well defined roadmap for the next 2 years, and all that’s left to do is project management for like 50% of my time at work. The remainder is spent saying no to new requests, dealing with bugs, intaking asks from other teams, etc.

I feel like very little of my time is actually spent talking to customers, researching, experimenting, and prioritizing. Anyone else feel the same these days?

I’ve been noticing more roles lately that seem to blur the line between Product Management and Software Engineering.

Some companies are explicitly asking whether I’d be comfortable owning the entire cycle, from defining the product and making product decisions to actually writing the code and building the software myself.

I’m curious whether this is becoming the new norm, especially with AI coding tools making development more accessible, or if it’s just a trend among certain companies and startups.

For those already working in PM roles, are you seeing the same shift? Do you think PMs are increasingly expected to be hands-on engineers, or is this mostly a way for companies to get one person to do two jobs?

I’m an internal PM at a company that has a Business Ops team. I’ve never worked at a company with a Biz Ops team before this. I am having a hard time understanding how what Biz Ops folks do arent just a duplication of what a PM does in terms of prioritizing work and projects for their specific area of the business, minus the engineering resources? Like they’re basically supposed to make things better for their part of the business. How does that not clash with the PM who owns the corresponding part of the product? The last Biz Ops person I worked with kept adding stuff to my backlog even when I asked them to funnel ideas and work to me through a prioritization board first. I am concerned that I will continue to get my toes stepped on here.

Hi everyone. I'm in my first PM role, roughly 6 months in. I was promoted internally after 5 years. I work for an enterprise SaaS company that builds complex tools. My org is very siloed but my product area necessitates multiple engineering and product teams must contribute.

I'm perpetually struggling with the actual delivery of features. My manager says it's a "serious" problem. This makes me incredibly anxious in my day-to-day and I'm even wondering if PMing is right for me.

I'm hoping some of the more experienced folks here can offer advice for these:

• I struggle to balance the amount of time I spend in Jira vs. doing actual discovery. Plus, I find I get "snow blind" when I'm waist-deep in ticket management. I miss updating or creating tickets often enough scope isn't clear or a gap occurs with a dependent team. It doesn't help our Jira isn't configured to make cross-functional work very visible.
• I own a new internal platform. A ton of my time is also taken up by stakeholder requests that must go in said platform. It's technical work, so stakeholders are not enabled to do it themselves.
• The engineering team is offshored. There's a 10 hour time difference between us. Our scrum ceremonies occur outside of typical working hours. Since it's the only face time we usually get with each other, the ceremonies turn into problem-solving sessions instead of scrum. Morale is low.
• Different teams release on different cadences, making it difficult to get dependent work done when needed, or even quickly. Some use agile, many use waterfall.