All Product Managers Have The Same Problems

4 min readMay 28, 2024

Imposter syndrome, stakeholders, skills, management, insights, users, Jira, product vision, team, scrum, agile and the list goes on.

Screenshot of productmanagementproblem.com taken by author

TL;DR — go to productmanagementproblem.com to witness the dawn of tomorrows go-to source for product managers in need.

The list above are just a few keywords describing our many problems.

If you ever feel like things are going too well, I bet they’ll go a little less well after checking that list. Because, there’s always a problem.

And hey, no one’s feeling sorry for us. Least of all us. Our job is awesome! We get to say what to build and then watch extremely competent people build it while thinking of the next step.

But here’s the thing about problems: they take our time and focus away from what really matters. Creating as much value with our product as possible.

I have 9 years of work experience at this point, five of them in product management. Before that I did software development and customer service.

I’ve tried doing scrum by the book, I’ve tried variations. I have, as everyone in the industry, at some point cursed the framework and its creators.

I’ve misused the term agile more times than I can count.

I’ve worked on legacy systems with more spaghetti than Italy combined, and I’ve taken a new idea to product while managing a corporate startup. I prefer the latter, but most of us work on the former.

I’ve worked with micro managers and tyranns. I’ve had non-present managers, or so called ninja-managers. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with great and inspirational leaders.

I’ve tried understanding users and their behavior and needs through interviews, powerBI, excel spreadsheets, google analytics, research reports, activity logs and by reading the god damn stars. Sometimes it feels like I’m playing a game of whack-a-mole, and sometimes you get the most exhilarating feeling to see your assumptions become true.

I reckon I’m not the only one having thirty tabs open when trying to solve a problem or understand a new topic. It just doesn’t seem to be one source to solve my problems.

Of course this is just another problem I had to solve. So an idea came to mind. What if I just made that source? A source that collects the best resources in one place?

So I did. It’s over at productmanagementproblem.com.

Keep in mind that I’m doing this the agile way (oops I did it again).

What do I mean by that? Well for starters, at the moment, there’s almost no content on the page besides the actual problems and a few articles.

I do believe this page will become a great source for product managers in need (I have many ideas), but for that to be the case I need to know that I’m addressing the correct problems.

On the landing you can find all top level problems, if you click one you’ll find related problems and articles. If there are no articles, you’ll be met with a “this page is under construction”-sign and the opportunity to subscribe to updates whenever new problems are added.