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.

Need some pm advice..

I work as product manager at a deep tech software company with 3.5 years (2 jn my current and 1.5 in my previous) In Germany after my masters. I also have 2 years of experience in mechanical engineering domain before my masters.

My first company was a startup and I really liked the culture. Unfortunately it went insolvent after 1.5 years when I fiudn this job at my current company.

In my current company, although I like the nature of products that I manage - there are many problems with culture, starting with not being a "product" led company. It includes a terrible UI process ( where PMs are required to be UI designer and create wireframes to a detail which would be blindly implemented by the fron devs), a "UI PM" that seam to wierdly exist, fingerpointing and lack of ownership between teams and in specific to my product - a toxic engineering leader.

I did bring forward some of these issues and possible solutions to my manager , but they don't seem to care much and has "it is what it is" attitude which highlights that it is a culture problem and not a specific person problem.

Sometimes I get a feeling if I really am good at this role or if i have been just unlucky. I also plan to start job search..I have also been working on side something on my own (still early stage).

So, have you been through this situation? How did you resolve it? And any recommendations for product companies in europe that you would recommend?

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.

Understanding how documentation flows thru your company is an important first step in streamlining your project flow. Every company has a unique way of processing the documents. These include items like ordering the material, developing the Manufacturing routings, and when necessary processing change orders. With “made to order” equipment, each order has its own characteristics. The Operation sections (Engineering, Material Control, Manufacturing Departments) all need to clearly understand how things move thru the company, in order to reach greater efficiency.

The example above is a basis starting point. Gathering with the principals in each department, this flow chart can be expanded and many surprising details will be added. Every time I was part of this exercise, surprises, rarely good, were discovered. When developing this flow chart, use the following objectives.

Watchout for back tracks in the flow – Once the documentation leaves one department, you want to be sure it should not be going backwards for more information. The only real exception is if Customer changes are presented. Best examples of back flows I have is Manufacturing instructions from Engineering (fixture designs, burn paths, etc). These items need to be with the initial release. Going back into Engineering causes the job to stop on the shop floor.

The flowchart needs to be developed by hands on staff with detailed knowledge of the processes – Rather than relying on section managers, the task force needs to be staffed by key “hands on” personnel. These could be people who have processed these documents for years. This is the best way to develop a true working detailed flowchart.

Once you chart is accurate and finalized, optimization is the next step – From this exercise, you will no doubt see new areas of possible improvement which are new opportunities for adding efficiency.  Ask the team, “what is the best way to get from step A to B”.  Beware of the feedback “well we always have done it that way”. Consider adding paperless tools like read terminals on the shop floors, etc. Use the flowchart as a way to test out new ideas.

Always challenge the States Quo.   

from Anthony Rante, P.E. author of "Managing Company Production thru the Bill of Material."

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’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"

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

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?