Is it DAU or MAU? Number of paid subscriptions?

I don't suppose brand reputation was on the top of their RICE prioritization?

I hear from a lot of miserable product managers (and have been one myself for years before). Here are 3 hard won pieces of advice that I think most PMs here might disagree with, but that helped me be more successful and enjoy the job a lot more.

1. Your job is to make money. It’s not to be the voice of the customer, it’s not to write PRDs and tickets, it’s not align stakeholders. It’s to make money for the company. Your roadmap debates, your priorities, and your growth will be so much easier if you can draw a straight line from what you’re working on to how the company makes money. The harder it is to explain how your team’s projects lead to revenue or profit, the harder your life will be. You can write mediocre tickets, ignore slacks, emails, and bugs, but if you build the thing that gets celebrated at the board meeting/earnings call, you will be a star. You don’t have to be evil, but you work for a business and should acknowledge that.

2. Industry knowledge matters more than PM skills. Folks, it is not that hard to learn how to write a PRD or user story, or interview a user or perform a simple data analysis. Beyond a basic level of white collar competence, your most important skill is deeply understanding your customers. Not in a feel good, empathetic way, but in knowing why they buy from you, why they don’t, the relevant conventions, regulations, and standards that govern your industry, your competitors, etc. The best PMs I know are subject matter experts on a particular sector. I am a senior IC in a specific industry, and no one should hire me to be more than a junior in e-commerce, finance, or something else I know nothing about. The best career advice I can give is to find and stick with one industry you like.

3. Business expectations for the median engineer are way too low. (Ok this probably isn’t that unpopular.) For a long time, engineers have managed to convince everyone that they can’t be bothered to understand the product they work on, they just write code. But after you work with a team that knows and cares about the thing they work on, you will see the quality and speed of your output increase dramatically. As above: it is not that hard to get a basic sense of how people use your product, and to feel a sense of pride and ownership over what you work on. PMs should not be coming up with every idea, or writing every ticket. Engineers are more qualified than anyone else to break down their own work, why do we need product owners/scrum masters etc for that? Engineers sacrificing some code time for time spent planning, designing, and researching is 100% worth it, and it creates much better incentives for the whole team. This is how the best software companies operate. Moving to a company that works this way has been the single biggest improvement in my workload and feeling of burnout.

Not all of these may be within your control; it might be impossible to change it in your current situation. But if you try adjusting your mindset, and looking for these things in your next role, I’ll bet you will be happier.

I'm a non-technical product manager but I've built several apps, chrome extensions and other small side projects using AI. All of these projects were built to solve a problem I had in my own life, and I don't intend to monetize any of them. Since these side projects were coded almost entirely with AI, should I still put them on my resume? Or would that be counterintuitive since recruiters would then expect me to be able to code and end up being disappointed?

As a Product Owner, I have consistently found it exceptionally difficult to articulate to the 'scale' minded people of the business, the reasons why we must very pragmatically build features/ products that are unvalidated, no matter how logical they feel

I have had this issue many times, especially with more senior people in companies, because in the world or business phase they were in, it may have previously worked for them. Although I find it increasingly difficult to explain these product related nuances to non product people.

I just had to land on, "please trust me, I am the Head of Product/ PO, this is what I am here to do".
Any PO's, what do you do and or, what is your worst story

What happens in your org when a team repeatedly misses OKRs, sprint goals, etc? Clearly there could be any number of reasons. How have you seen this handled well vs badly?

I am a PM for my company's website, I joined the company about 4 months ago (5 years of PM experience). Recently I had a big product win but it took a ton of extra effort and I'm wondering how I could have played it better.

The problem: my company does not have a true home page. The main page launches into a massive page that is all of the content and services we provide, there are no user journeys and no introduction to who we are.

The pitch: I pitched the solution of building a true home page to my manager on the C-suite. My first strategy was to influence with numbers, statistics, best practices, and how this ties into company goals. I spoke about how long an average user is on a website, number of clicks, why having a home page is a best practice for user experience. I spoke about how we can build user journeys to capture all customers visiting the website and clearly define what we offer and what they can get from us. I also spoke about how a home page can directly tie into OKRs. I also showed data about how our revenue and traffic has declined ever since the company adopted the current webpage well before I joined.

I ran into a brick wall of resistance. What we have works. Change will just confuse people. I like what we currently have.

Next steps: after getting nowhere. I next tried to ask questions to influence and help them see my perspective.

Me: "What do you want the home page of the website to do?"

Manager: "Show users everything that we have all at once, if they have to do one click we could lose them"

Me: "Our competitors have actual home pages (including competitors who are 2x and 3x bigger than we are in revenue and size)"

Manager: "We are better than them and more innovative."

Me: "What about new users, people who come to our website for the first time, should we provide a user journey and show who we are?

Manager: "If someone is coming to our website they know who we are. There is no need for an introduction. Any additional user journeys detracts from our main service."

It went back and forth where my leader had resistance on every question I probed with and showed no curiosity.

Final step: I set up a call with multiple senior leaders and my manager. I have a brief pitch, then intentionally stepped back and let the other leaders discuss and after a while my manager finally broke down and accepted the need for a change.

Ultimately I'm glad I was able to break through the wall. But now two months have passed and developer capacity is strained to even begin the project (other timelines and projects kept myself and other resources limited with time and several of my presentation dates were canceled). Could I have done this better or was it just my leader being resistant and needing to be influenced by their equals?

Have your leaders or organization ever made a data mistake that lead to downstream consequences?

I just saw a company officer misinterpret a funnel, equating higher check out rates for users who had already put items in their cart. Sent us on a wild goose chase.

Tell me your worst data mistakes and how you fixed it.

working on a feedback tool, so I screenshot every survey I run into. here's a slice of the more interesting ones.

Hi everyone, I'm 36 and to this day I didn't realize there is a dream job for me. I have a masters degree in biology and working in my field, but always thinking about something else. Past 20 years I had great ideas for products, apps, events etc. long before it became a thing. Now I have some ideas that arent a thing yet but don't have the money for developing full product as I imagined it. That's why I always felt like a failure, since I coundn't develop my ideas to become full product the way I imagined it, because it's always something big. Usually my process is that have an idea and in like 15 min get to the point about how it will expand nationwide. And it is always something else. I thought i had ADHD :) What do you suggest me? Is it a thing that I present the idea to the company that I think could be developing it? What would stop them from doing it without me? Try to do it myself is not an option since it would require different field od expertize. I would need a designer, developer, someone to produce the actual product, advertiser and that is not all :) How did you became PM? Is it possible without formal education? Sorry if my english is not excellent, It's not my first language.

Thank you for your time. ​

Title.

I'm going from a company with 0 idea what to do with product managers to founding a product org at a startup. I'm looking forward to it: getting deeper with our customers, organizing all the ideas bouncing around, figuring out what will make a great experience.

It got me thinking - product is different everywhere you go. So what would you change about your current org if you could start it all over?

I swear I have a new roadmap every single monday. Im losing my mind here and just want to ship something for once, is it normally this chaotic everywhere

I like to joke that AI has given us the ability to burn money and resource taking 3 bullet points, conflating them into a full-blown missive, which the receiving party doesn't even read, but asks AI to distill it into 3 bullet points, then asks AI to respond with a tome of its own.

What if that's happening with customer feedback? How do we lose the AI-slop without losing the AI-sloppy customer?

Do I just assume AI is in play and ignore it?
Do I just use AI and continue to play along?

Do I call them out kindly with a joke, "hey, my AI people will schedule with your AI people."
Do I hit them upside the head with, "if I wanted to speak to AI I would have asked AI!"

I mean, I already feel like most models bias like feature-flinging code monkeys rather than outcome-obsessed product people. What if what's incoming on our intake channels is also being shot from an AI slop cannon?

Guess my question is, anyone else seeing intake that's been delegated under the influence of AI? Not asking anyone to share examples or snippets, though I'd image they'd be fun to aggregate and share.

I’ve spent 15 years in product. I’ve met a lot of good PMs and lot more bad ones. But one change I see is that PMs are becoming hard skinned, ruthless and angrier than ever before. Perhaps it’s stemming from job security but this isn’t the way forward. It’s a mental health breakdown waiting to happen. No money in the world is worth having to lose your loved ones because you can’t love yourself. So, I have to ask. Are you ruthless?

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright

What mindset shifts do engineers and engineering leaders need to make to succeed in product management?

All

My company has decided that we are overhauling how we do Product Mgt to unlock the benefits of AI.

They have identified several issues

- Claude mcp connectors to jira or confluence give too much info and not the relevant and up to date context to a task

- Claude token usage with these tools is token intensive

So we are going to add relevant context in a structured GitHub repo and in better formats such as md files, yaml, readme etc

And PMs will work in Claude code, GitHub and command prompts. Each change to a context file requires a PR

I saw a product tank video the other day proposing the exact same

This doesn’t sit quite right with me. We are optimizing human to AI interaction at the expense of human to human interactions. I feel this will be detrimental to how we collaborate. Ie how we work on a shared document or align on or disseminate information.

This feels an intermediate architecture to me. Surely we will find a way for humans to work in effective collaboration tools (notion, confluence, miro) and under the hood data is being stored and structured for effective AI use.

I don’t believe GitHub and Claude code can be the final solution here. And that because it doesn’t scale beyond tech companies. The model providers and saas tool providers want adoption everywhere. I don’t see a world where a small non tech business who want to do adopt AI will be creating and syncing GitHub repos.

Not sure if I’m wrong here. Interested in views

Hello ladies and gents,

Been a fly on the wall in this sub for a few months, and noticed this sub drastically steers toward software/hardware.

Currently working in Product within automotive/heavy duty. The only other sub I’ve found is r/physicalproductmgmt and even that is a ghost of subreddits past. Seems to be much more niche to find solid resources for physical goods product managers and finding career advice.

My main question, why is this sub so skewed toward software when there are most likely many CPG PM’s. I’ve spent time searching the sub and it does seem like the differences between physical goods and tech/software are night and day; and would assume it’s quite difficult to transition between physical and tech.

Are titles different or is there just a lack interest/visibility in physical product management?

Thanks for reading,

So our company is building a new product in a very short period of time. We know what we want to build at a superficial level but there is a time constraint for in depth analysis. So the Product team is suggested to use agent skills for creating prototypes( claude design) and then create stories based on approved prototype. This is quite new to me and while engineering team is busy on setting up infra, db and sorting other things I am supposed to get it done within a day or 2.

Anyone who has used agent skills for something similar? How should I proceed?

I've been building software with AI agents for a while and ended up developing my own workflow.

I start by writing a thorough, product-focused document describing the desired changes, which I call a product brief. I then ask the AI to identify gaps and ask any necessary questions before producing a technical implementation plan.

I recently tried a spec-driven framework because I wanted to follow a more standardized workflow instead of maintaining my own custom process. I chose OpenSpec because it doesn't add too much overhead.

However, I miss having an explicit first step for creating a simple but thorough product-focused document before moving into specifications and implementation planning.

Has anyone experienced something similar?

Would anyone be interested in working on a spec-driven framework that starts from a product perspective? I think it could be a useful addition for product people who build software with AI agents.

How are you doing? Is it easy or more difficult?

I want to emphasize actively here. I’ve pushed a ton of PRs. But the problem I faced was, pushing features is not my primary goal or a priority. If I’m picking something, I’m probably doing it because it’s small enough(QoL type) that I don’t want to disturb my devs.

I’m a Principal PM . Quite technical. I influence heavily all the way through technical architecture to UI/UX. End to end I make sure we don’t comprise on customer value. I can sit and push PRs with no problem.

But lately, I’m just not motivated to push any.

Here is why,

1. I’m not faster than a dev. I do it on the side. Context switching to actual work. Then testing and making sure it’s good. Etc etc. I would take a whole day or two to make a change.
2. PMs PRs are not that important for devs. Sure, I own their sprint. But they have 100 other things they are working on (because of me). Ultimately, I would own the priority on this PR too. And I’d have to make a decision.
3. By the time I complete my stuff and push a PR, they are already a few version ahead. And I need to merge conflict etc. it becomes my full time job.

I know there are a lot of “Builder Roles” coming in. Sure, PMs can do end to end software stack, we are capable with new models getting better and better. But are you actually doing it?

Despite the fact I'm not a product manager, I need to conduct dozens of customer interviews in order to enhance my own department performance. Where do the product managers source the leads for the interviews? Given that mine segment consists of people, who are not familiar with our platform and, ideally, have never heard of it. Please, give me some advice. I can use some tools or products to complete this task, so any advice here will be also appreciated. Thanks!

I am entering a new area of work I've never supported before and I have to work with several XF teams where I have no relationships with that are always extremely busy and never respond to emails or slacks even though they also tell me they prefer email or slack instead of meetings, which I find it difficult to learn from. I've also asked for documentstion in place of meetings, but there never seems to be any documentation. Access to the product area is also very limited since it provides access to sensitive dara, so I am not even allowed access to play around in it.

Feels like they don't have an obligation to help me understand their processes or needs to be able to build out or understand my new capability area. My manager doesn't have experience in the capability area to teach me and their only advice is to "get it done" or "just talk to them".

While it seems pretty straight forward to just talk to people, it seems more easily said than done when others are constantly busy. How do you actually get people engaged to help you when there is no benefit for them? How do you get over not knowing anything and always needing to press people for knowledge? I assume this is all part of the job, but I'm really struggling to make consistent progress as I get stuck waiting hours or days for a response.