Keep your engineering manager happy and everything else goes well

Everything goes slow you mean lol. This assumes the EM is good

Computer Operator

Business Development Manager

Work on your communication. Verbal. Written. Every part.  
 Learn to Be crisp and precise in communicating anything be it brief to designer or requirements to developers or updates to stakeholders

Product Owner

Learn who are the muscle movers in your org. Build good relationships and rapport with them. Influence is the most underrated PM skill

Product Head

Software Developer

Founder

Welcome to Product Managers's Private Community

Drop some underrated PM advice that no one takes seriously.

Product Manager

Drop some underrated PM advice that no one takes seriously.- Grapevine

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

Undervalued learnings, useless for folks who are arm-chair PMs

1. High pressure on timelines- business and top management shits on you if you don’t deliver on time
2. No power to control the outcome- engineers don’t listen to you neither does the design or analytics team, you end up begging for resources
3. Too much politics- business or a senior PM can steal your bandwidth anytime
4. Lack of recognition- if it succeeds business did it, if it fails it is product teams fault (engg never gets blamed for shit)

I believe Product Management is a really toxic role

Hi! Can you please suggest websites or apps to get mentorship or exposure. I'll go first - ADPList.

Websites/apps to get mentorship or exposure

Business Analyst

What is the most underrated skill to be a great product manager? 

Mine has always been the ability to make friends with people at the office. SWEs, other PMs etc

Underrated skills to have for Product Management

Product Marketing Manager

Whenever you a call PM fraud here, they come & put justifications like you don't know business, products built by Engineers are shyt, only PMs can build good products, engineers don't prioritize business needs bla bla.

A data scientist/analytics perspective:
1. When we call a PM fraud, we refer to mainly those who come without a background in either of tech or business. Cool wannabes straight out of college & learnt nothing but attitude over years.
If a PM was an engineer, or analytics, or business or ops, then others first see him/her as engineer/etc & then a manager. That's the right way it should be. 

2. 'Business won't be prioritized' is such a complacency:
Business is bread & butter of Analytics and AI. It is the primary thing we check in interviews, a large portion of the interview focus' on the problem statement and prioritisations.

End note: PMs are hot, but only when they have a solid foundation in stuff they are building. They need to know depths. Anyone apart from this breed are worthless & Indian startups are filled with this shyt
A best PM would be a senior engineer/analyst with penchant for business practicality & customer perspective.

Why of 1st Point? Because how can you manage a team when you don't even know what that team does? For eg: I can tell my PM any random blabbing about why model is working/not & she has no idea to judge my words. Leave AI, with tech pipelines too I can give any deadlines & justify it how would she know? Besides if they don't have tech background they bring in random expectations which is far away from feasibility. Why should any tech guy respect them? They can understand business req, connect with business teams and build better. That's the exact role of a project manager.

Product Manager Worth & their insecure justifications

Founding Engineer

Experienced Product, Tech, Sales, founder folks of GV, what would be your one piece of advice for a new APM/PM (1-2 yoe) in the industry, that would help them in the long run.
Feel free to also let us know any mistakes you made as a Product guy, early in your career.

Advice for PMs!

Welcome to Personal Finance's Private Community

Okay, this post is not for any comparison but genuinely want to get insight on where do i stand in terms of saving among the corporate employees. 
I will go first. 
Age :28
NW : 65L

What's your net worth?

5.75 crore including flat . Not including car or jewellery. No loans or emis or debt of any kind . Age 41

Program Manager

Software Engineer

Hi Folks, coming across on linkedin lot of posts by PM Influencers and it is literally overwhelming. How to separate good content from the annoying ones. Can an aspiring PM fix to few consistent quality resources and do quietly PM work.


Are quiet PMs able to learn more on product management.


Day by Day Linkedin posts on PM by PM Influencers are shitholes.

Quiet PMs

Share your 2 cents keep it short and to just 1 advice!

Drop one solid advice for someone who wants to be a Product Manager! 🦄

PM of 5 years. Same place the whole time. We have a new Engineering Manager. 

They started 2 months ago and at first they seemed like they were very happy to learn our process and products. Then they soon started to manipulate the Engineering team which was very cooperative earlier.

It’s incredibly demotivating. We are a small startup, and the culture isn’t great but seriously no need to be so dismissive of other people’s efforts and feelings. They are just fucking rude. No other word for it really. The problem is that they do NOT get the product side of things so you can’t explain anything to them. They start to physically roll their eyes when you go anymore product than the word “PRD”.

I have never had to deal with someone like this and it’s really stressing me out as they are involved in effectively every project I work on. Advice that isn’t “quit” will be appreciated.

I should also clarify that when I say “product limitations” I really mean how much effort goes into getting things right, the delays are shearing the roadmap apart.

why do Software Engineers act so rude? How to solve this in my team?

As a Product Manager, why do Software Engineers act so rude?

Saw some misguided student post about PM internships. This is for anyone considering a PM internship.

DONT.

A fresher should not be going into Product Management. Focus on building hard skills first. You need an edge/alpha in your career strategy while reducing risk.

Atleast work for 1 year in the industry in a hard skill role. Then, think about transitioning.

This does two things.

1. You have a core differentiator compared to other candidates: Engg/ Design/ Sales/ Data Science/ Analytics.

Having a PM internship is not a good enough differentiator. No company would hire a Product Management intern over someone with hard skills in another domain. 

Product is different. In SDE, it makes sense to have multiple internships as it gives confidence to the recruiter that you’ll be able to do your job.

In PM, no recruiter worth their salt will consider a PM internship contributing to you being a successful PM. Your internship doesn’t contribute anything meaningful to its ability to communicate your skill.

2. You realise if you’re getting into a field because it’s a fad or you’re genuinely interested in it.

I’ve seen many such freshers switch into product and get into suboptimal orgs. Don’t. Do your career a favour and work on your hard skills. That alone will contribute a lot more to your Product Skills than some poor internship.

As a GPM at Gojek, I will never hire anyone who has done a PM internship unless they have a solid track record in a hard skill based role.

You can only be a good “enabler“ if you can empathise with a “builder”. 

Can you be a PM out of college, YES? Should you? NO.

You’ll realise this later in your career. First gain experiences building/enabling real products, you’ll thank yourself for that when it helps you build better Products. 

Also, stop listening to these charlatans who masquerade as Product Gurus. They are out to make a quick buck. Don’t do these Product Courses. It’s all a farce. First, get some experience and then you’ll know

Why you shouldn’t do PM internships?

Would be great if you can share somethings that you've learnt it the hard way especially on topics like stakeholder management (dealing with engineering/ execs/ founders/ P&L team), learning/ upskilling, switching internally/ externally, perfection vs hacky stuff

PMs with 10+ YOE of experience, what are some lessons that you want to share with folks who've just started out

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

Note - I am a product manager too

4 out of 5 product managers will act all high and mighty of themselves, bragging their way as if they run everything going on in the company, flaunting their business degrees and being utterly disrespectful towards their team( dev design qa name it), 

Recently started going to office so the attitude I am seeing is very transparent and more visible (more with the higher experience folks)

It makes me wanna leave this hyper inflated role, thinking of I will end up like them scares me, and you have to do is speak out jargons in meetings day in day out and have a English accent of Shashi Tharoor.

Recently my manager told that this is a role where you have to very representable or very visible and act in floor as if you are the busiest person on earth and I seriously some PMs in company doing that, they walk so fast in floor as if they will fall off or would be better to have 4 legs.

I am done with this product management shit

Have heard a lot of stories other way round. Want to see if this perspective exists at all or not.

Any developers here who realized the importance/value/contribution of PMs? If yes, how so?

Consultant, Investment Banking went from sought after careers to fads post 2008 crisis when the world realized that these folks are crooks due to their role in propogating the Great Financial Crisis.

Given the backlash tech companies has been getting and global layoffs, will Product Manager also become a passing fad?

Seeing lot of anti Product Manager sentiment on this app off late. Was Product Management also a fad?

Someone here said engineers can become PM but PM can't become engineers. It can't be more correct than this. But reality is, it sounds goods only in theory.  
  
  I asked this same question to my director, why have you hired us when engineers clearly know more about products than us and are capable?  His answered that before the organisation formally created a team of product managers, it was only engineers that were handling product for decades. But that resulted into substandard products being developed, chaotic product release and consistent drop in revenue. The reason being engineers became backlog managers and engineers beging engineers, never focused on business value. Instead, they focused on technical aspect heavily. Engineers never bothered to check if what they were developing will actually sell in the market or not.  
  
 And mind you, this was a product that all of us use in daily lives. The numbers of users in India alone would be millions. So to summarise, yes, engineers can become PMs but generally they stay loyal to their pedigree of BE/B.Tech and become very shitty PMs. They like to have more technical conversations than strategic discussions and hate things that are not quantifiable, subjective. And business facing people here in forum would know, things are always not quantifiable in business planning, market outlook. It is based on assumptions.  
  
 An excellent PM would be someone who is an engineer but knows how to focus on business value of the product, make it customer oriented etc. I had the pleasure of working of one such PM in my last stint and he was truly outstanding. CEO knew him personally and this is in an organization with thousands of employees

Lately I am seeing a lot more people talk about the fact that being a PM is a sub optimal strategy for an eventful career in Tech. However, let me remind you that people in tech tend to be predominantly engineers and they like the people skills needed to be good at making Products for actual humans.

I have personally witnessed PMs be great at talking to various teams in Engg, Design, Analystics and Operations. They are so good at talking that they forget that they actually need to work and not just speak all the time. I feel that PMs are all talk but now work and just chill around the foosball table all day. Once in a while they will go and flirt with that new chick that joined their team. In case the joke wasn't clear, "PMs are the cesspool of Tech". 😂

We need PMs more than you think...

I’ve probably seen 15+ young, impressionable college students fall prey to PM course scams in the last month only. PLEASE DO NOT JUMP INTO COURSES THINKING YOU’LL END UP IN PRODUCT MANAGEMENT FOR LONG. Please build some hard skills - SQL, Analysis, Figma, basics of python, basics of APIs, prompt engineering etc first. APMs who don’t have any hard skills and are only good at user journey, product sense, bettering a product, etc., would be massacred very soon. Shift to PM after some work experience. I’m getting my LinkedIn flooded with requests which look similar - 

Hi , I’m enthusiast about PM, read a few Nir eyal, Theils, have worked as an intern on <Unknown Product> and would like to apply for Position at your company. I’ve done blah blah courses and feel I’d be a good fit. NO YOU WON’T. Please save yourselves. :(

Advice to College folks on PM career

I'm a product manager myself and I've been noticing this mentality.

Founders of pre-PMF stage companies, having raised tons of money in the bull market in a last couple of years, have hired tons of resources with no clarity and vision whatsoever.

They continue to ignore they're building a product nobody wants. They barely talk to users. On top of it, they hire Product Managers thinking it's a silver bullet and will solve PMF issues.

It's founders responsibility to figure out PMF and not anybody's else. You need to get in the weeds and not throw money at problems.

It just doesn't end there. These companies with average talent pool and the kind of culture that sets it top-down because of these average founders, expect PMs to own everything and fix everything. Everybody from Tech to Marketing shrugs off from the responsibility expect PMs to tell what needs to be done. This chutiya mindset of 'sit and wait' until a PM tells let breeds more inefficiency as output becomes slower as nobody is incentivised to think and take decisions. Also, everybody enjoys doing what are being told because no consequences if things blow up.

Hire competent people across functions and get involved in product building. It's already too late to fix it if this resonates with you.

PM roles have made startups with average talent pool more inefficient

Unfortunately this is the reality in most companies in the world. It's not just pre-PMF startups.  
  
 That's just how things are in corporate. 
  
 I was lucky to be working in a pre-PMF startup where engineers took more responsibility. And they themselves planned out the tech debt and optimised APIs/queries, etc.  
  
 And I know I'm not gonna find such set of engineers ever again.  
  
 Best thing to do is to make peace with it and do whatever you can to make the best product 😀

Drop some underrated PM advice that no one takes seriously.

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