Tonymontana7

Laid off as a generalist PM after managing 0-1 for an early stage startup

Got laid off from my first product management job. Was the company’s first APM hire and built 70% of their client facing features from 0 to 1.

As an early PM with 2 years of product experience (3+ if you throw in analytics roles I’ve done before), what will be a good fit role for me?

I’ve narrowed them down to 3

PMM 2.PM-1
Founders office roles

Can anyone tell me the pros and cons of going into each role after a long APM stint (slightly less than 2 years, was their walking GPT for every tec-product-business thing they did, also was informally managing 3-4 people)

9mo ago

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Flipkart9mo

Lol. 'built 70%?'. How do you think a PM can actually build a thing. And 70% of the product 😂. Level of entitlement is un believable.

It takes real work to be valued and not be fired, that's basic. Even good engineers who actually build something get fired. Leave this PM shyt and stop the search for moocher job, instead learn a skill and work on something real

Tonymontana7

ShipRocket9mo

I was more of a generalist first. Most of early report automations I wrote are still part of the production systems driving daily visibility for clients

I also single-handedly coded a tool that enables them integrate with multiple client sales channels and also did first 0-1 on all the business dashboards and alerts.

AFTER that, I started doing a lot of product.

So maybe not a moocher?

RoyalCafe87

Student9mo

Leave bro the guy above is probably someone who thinks pm is a fake job since he is a developer. Keep searching you have good YoE in product should get you shortlists . Sometimes people who are alone and sad get hateful just to feel good about themselves.

UnfitChafe39

Stealth9mo

PMM - Not really worth it given that there's not a lot of job opportunities in this space. Mostly B2B SaaS companies hire for PMMs and that too at a much lower TC compared to their PM counterparts. I personally love PMM role (because of being a lot creative) but won't switch to one because of the reasons I stated.
PM-1 - The only reasonable choice here imo. PM role pays well, there's a decent demand for it and gives you opportunity to create great impact. From a long term perspective, PM-1 is your best bet.
Founder's office - Don't go into founder's office early into your career. In most cases, you'll be acting as a glorified PA to the founders. It might help you build great connections, but it won't teach you any hard skills apart from making PPTs.

Tonymontana7

ShipRocket9mo

Thanks for this. My motivation to move into a PMM role Is because I see the general PM role dying out.

I genuinely believe a lot of companies will shift to a product trio model like Apple/AirBnB

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Flipkart9mo

That's true logically.
A pure PM role is very fake. Here you atleast have a sword on your head to hold you really accountable because u r responsible for the marketing/branding success atleast.
In PM role, true ownership always lies with the engineering/builders, and any risk of product success being attributed to PMs is purely bogus & fake.
It's made to cushion the blow to engineering, which honestly weakens them because they don't face the heat directly and it's unfortuantely put on cute product managers who didn't even put a single brick in the build.

Further more, why I am against PM roles is that in big majority of engineering projects, a customer research is not really that critical. Product vision is many times semi obvious. So ab good designer + EM who can collect requirements really well will suffice. Now you will argue 'am I really saying PRD is not required?'. Sure let's say it is required, but then when execution happens how many times do you change the PRD and that too based on what? Your nuanced understanding is engineering solutions and feasibility. If this is really the worth of PRD where you figure out the right functionality based on engineering solutioning, what is the true worth of the original prd where EM didn't have to come and tweak. Maybe the solution is just have very few but very experienced PMs to design the customer requirement and let engineering fill in the gaps. We don't need kiddo PMs to detail out nitty gritties of the features, which will always be driven and changed by engineering. EMs can fill those gaps quite effectively.