26 problems with being a product manager
And it’s not moaning, it’s just reality
Published in
3 min readNov 13, 2020
- There are too many ideas to keep track of, but you’re expected to keep them all safe for when you need them
- There aren’t enough good ideas to hit the goal you need to hit, only ideas for things that won’t affect the KPI you need to affect
- There isn’t enough time in the current sprint to finish all the work, every sprint
- There isn’t enough time to plan the next sprint, because you’re too busy with the current sprint
- One stakeholder wants it to work likes this but another wants it to work like that and you’re expected to make them both happy
- Stakeholders have never thought about the return on investment of the feature they’re requesting
- Stakeholders always think that their request is easy to build
- Stakeholders always think their request is more important than any other stakeholder’s request
- Stakeholders think that PMs just ask too many questions
- Engineers think that PMs don’t ask enough questions
- Engineers think that the feature requests are too hard to build
- You need to think tiny detail one minute and then long term strategy the next
