What are some of the toughest problems you face on daily basis as a PM?

For me it’s always around stakeholder management. I’m kind of an introvert, and it drains down all my energy to talk to different sort of people throughout the day. Post meetings, I barely have any energy left to actually work on stuff that is important. I kind of have sleepless nights, especially when I have to present something to senior leadership, I know they will have questions, or will slice/dice data in a way that will require me 2/3 days of work to get back to them. Luckily, I’ve got an EM who kind of handles the engineering part really well. So I’m not bogged down by the meetings on engineering front. What do hacks do you use to really align well with stakeholders? ps: my manager is kind of supportive, but they will throw me under the bus, if tough questions are asked in any of the high level meetings.

ElonMast

Amazon

9 months ago

I don’t know if there are any generic hacks, but coming from similar culture, my points are - The biggest winning point for Amazon is - Document culture. In fact, pre reads are such an integral part of any level of meetings, all VPs, SVPs take time to read instead of bombarding questions. Not sure, if there’s something missing in your team. If yes, maybe keep sharing those documents before talking to those stakeholders. Throwing under the bus is again a very common trait I observed at amazon, you have to remove your dependence and be honest if you don’t know something. Asking time is never looked down. Reading all your inputs make me a guess that your team might not be having a program management support. Many single threaded owners don’t believe in PgM and expect PdMs to handle it. See, if you can ask for a PgM support. Last but not the least PdMs play a significant role in decision making process, help in aligning the stakeholders. Your communication will build reputation, which is a valuable currency at Amz.

polymath

Stealth

9 months ago

As a TPM, the toughest problem is to pay the context switch penalty between a Tech problem with devs/engg and stakeholders (non-tech) multiple times a day and sometimes at the same time or one after the other.

LawsOfUniverse

Arya

9 months ago

Bandwidth crunch. We are getting calls for every issue / requirement / Engineering queries. This leads very less time to actually do anything

Cred

Zomato

9 months ago

Guys I also have same problem

EdtechPolice

Stealth

9 months ago

Can this be done by end of december🙄