What is the biggest problem you face in your daily job? Please mention your role as well.

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.

As the title says ☝️

Can PMs here please describe their day to day work? What kind of things do you work on? What scale of products/users do you deal with? Likes and dislikes about being a PM?

What are the unique problems that you faced working as a PM in a startup at various stages vs the ones in corporate?

Sometimes feel that PM is a fake profession. We do not have clear requirements that are the same for all companies - some companies want you to be design-oriented, others data-oriented, or technical. Some want you to be the “voice” of customers, while in others you work on feature factories as a good old blue-collar boy. There are no clear hard skills other than reading and writing. There are numerous debates - product sense vs data sense, execution vs intuition, first principles thinking vs frameworks. And my favorite one - leading without authority. Somewhere, the product is responsible for the business and P&L, and somewhere you are responsible for grilling the steak of your stakeholder. In the company next door, the product manager moves tasks in Jira and calls the elders in case of any problem. The variability of the role makes it really a funny & intriguing situation.

Grapevine is the place where i have heard so much about PM. I can understand what it is but what are the skills required to get into it . Coding Language or analytical or btech or MBA or what,? State it like you are telling it to a commerce grad. Thanks.

Hello Everyone, I am a 2018 BTech (NIT) pass out and 2022 IIM pass out with a total of 2.2 years of Workex (1.2 yrs post-MBA) and currently working as an Associate Product Manager. I am not really enjoying my role and I feel Product Management is not suitable for me because of multiple reasons some of them being, 1. I am doing issue resolutions rather than problem-solving which I love to do. 2. I am not very much interested in driving technical discussions or solving technical challenges in the process of Product Development which is the case in my current role. 3. I want to be part of a Business role where I can leverage the knowledge I have gained during my MBA and work on some problem statements related to the core businesses of the company. 4. There is no skin in the game of a PM compared to Devs, QAs, and Designers. As a PM I feel I am just delegating, prioritizing, and following up with the requirements. Most of my learnings are around managerial aspects and not business knowledge. 5. I want to be a part of business roles where I can go deeper into problems and come up with my recommendations/thoughts on them. I am looking for new roles where Strategy, Analysis and Core Business Problem solving are involved. I am really not sure what kind of roles are these. Please help me with the roles I can explore and how to approach the job search for such kinds of roles. Thanks In Advance.