You Must Get Out - My Experience of 4 Years In Product
I know Grapevine is full of young and ambitious people that either planning to get into Product or are already working as a PM. I don’t aim to discourage any of you. Moreover, if you need tips to break into Product I would be happy to help you.
I personally feel that knowing what you are doing is going to doom is better than normalizing it.
So I will convey my experience in simple words, how I hated every single day of it, why did I still stick around for 4 years, why product decisions are random political bullshit, why you should not let anything that happens get under your skin and affect your morale. Finally, few words for sociopathic Head of Products.
Lesson #1: Go through all stages of grief at once. Accept that product culture is broken and accept that it will not get better. Finally, you can’t fix it or improve it.
Lesson #2: Ratings are political bullshit. I can tell you the years I was rated worse I was probably working harder and better at my job. It just depends on the results you get in the last month before ratings and whether your DOP is vocal for you.
Lesson #3: Last piece of advice: do not let your Product years lower your self esteem or sense of self worth.
Also, some words for sociopathic Head of Products. F’ you.
Heavily second this. I’m a tech focus generalist who stumbled upon PMing after multiple startup exits. Absolutely bonkers role with no role definition, metric ownership, impact driving. Anyone who disagrees, is lying to themselves. What I can define PM in Indian / many valley based companies with Indian founders -> glorified bhains charane wala.
Only way to have a chilled PM life is own a complete product line and don't report to anyone but a CPO or CEO.
But why did you stick around for 4 years? Was it the money?
I'm currently working in product growth success and I'm neutral about it.
But if I were to get out, which field to choose? I'm from a non tech background so being an SWE is off the record lol.
Thanks for this thread tho and all the best! Hope you start your own venture and bring about this change ☺️
Obviously money and prestige. Both were good.
PM as a discipline has existed for more than 2 decades at Microsoft, and it has evolved a lot but never seemed like going away. I haven't worked at Desi start ups as a Product Manager and I don't know what is the status there, but the PM role is here to stay. Only because some half baked randos are spoiling the role in India doesn't mean the domain is useless.
Majority defines and shapes what it means to be a PM. Not saying that MSFT does not have a good PM culture, what I’m saying is: you haven’t shipped anything worthwhile in the last year and neither have I. If you really think about it, we would be better off learning how to code to validate our heuristics rather than masquerading as hyper intelligent beings that pass commands and judgements left right and centre.
Why do you think coding and building the product is the only way to validate it? If that was it, then we would be bombed with useless MVPs all around.
The product with PM role in India is that a lot of folks, without any strong product skills, were able to get into the role during the free money years and are now engaging in politics to survive. These folks took PM as an easy way out to escape from hard SDE interviews, and also because of all YouTube 'gurus' who misguided them.
And this is not only true with PM, but with software engineering as well, a lot of them were able to get in because of low bar during last few years but are struggling to create value at the pay they were hired at (think of it as putting TCS support engineer at a big tech firm).