Need advice from experienced Product Managers at tech product companies.
This is my first job. I come from an IIT with top of the class grades (in a non-IT branch with no DSA prep) and had very strong extra-curriculars too. Having said that, I was a top candidate for consulting roles as well as product roles on campus. As fate would have it, I got into a PM role. Now I have always been fascinated by the role solely because it was always glorified as 'the Entrepreneur to be' role. (at least to me, that was the entire USP of it).
It has been a few months for me in Product. During the prep, there is all the Product thinking and user empathy, maybe some ask of data analysis. But when it comes to the real job, I am barely ever able to get my hands on the first two. All the time gets used up in execution because my company is too lean to have any dedicated project managers (the pay is great though). The remaining time goes in data retrieval (not analysis) because apparently PMs and SPMs don't write queries or interact with users. They opine (what their manager opines up the ladder) I fear if it's the same everywhere else. It was like this at my previous organisation (internship, non tech) where the CEO yelled at people when on-ground numbers did not reflect his thoughts. The only difference here is that there is no yelling, just subtle corporate HR cushioned pressure.
Maybe it is the 'fast moving' nature of the organisation but the best that I can describe it as is a feature shipping factory with no aim for differentiation whatsoever. All ideas are built from the incumbents' implementations. Any attempt at differentiation is shot down (by middle management) whose primary metric is the number of features against their name at the end of the appraisal cycle. While top down, this may look great: we are trying 100 things, getting 90 of them correct. But there's a possibility that we could have done 92 things, 91 correct, 1 wrong. But the 1 extra correct thing could have been something novel that the users actually wanted. The chances of this happening are not so bleak, in my opinion, because the high level (upper management) cannot possibly be in touch with the on ground reality (no matter how much they claim it in their linkedin posts).
I am told that I should push engineers towards the solutions that will be the fastest (even if they callout potential tech debt) so that more features can be shipped in the least amount of time.
Now, I really don't aspire to be like the people who are above me. And I don't know if it's a normal thing. I don't want to become the person who imposes their 'hunch' (just a copy of what some other app did 2 years back) onto the actual owner of the project when data is inconclusive. I don't find any intellectual stimulation in it.
Am I PM-ing wrong? Am I PM-ing in the wrong Org? Or am I not meant to be a PM?
That's how it will be.... Most of time, there won't be any data to make decisions.... PM is not about strategy, mini CEO, decisions based on insights etc. as propagated.... it's execution execution execution
Then what does a Project Manager do?
Really curious. I'm new to tech and corporates.
they work on making project plans, assigning resources, conducting meetings with external stakeholders etc.. In some early startups, project manager role is also expected to be done by Product Manager
You need to leverage the upper managers to drive work as many of them may not listen.
You’re PM’ing in the wrong org. True Product Management—the kind that generates real value for both the organization and its users—is built on a foundation of extensive user research, data analysis, and the ability to distill actionable requirements from your findings. This is what separates great products from mere copycats. Execution is non-negotiable in either case, but the underlying approach makes all the difference.
Mastering execution is crucial in the early years of your PM career. Become ruthless at it. Focus on excelling at execution for the next one, one-and-a-half years in your current org. I cannot stress this enough: get ridiculously good at execution.
That said, most tech companies in India operate as feature factories. They focus on copying competitors’ offerings with little regard for measuring impact, solving user pain points, or building something truly innovative. You’ll end up slogging to ship features without knowing whether they made a difference.
With your credentials, I strongly suggest learning execution where you are, then moving on to a company that values great Product Management. Once you demonstrate strong execution skills, your caliber will open doors to great product companies. If Product Management is truly your calling, staying in a feature factory is a dead end. It’s unrewarding, monotonous, and strips away the joy of building meaningful products.
Start by talking to users, analyzing data, and learning the principles of good design. Aspire to be great at two out of these three: Tech, Design, or Data.
Those are my two cents.
All the best!
Thank you!
Do you have any tips on how I should about the two?
When can I be sure that I have learned to be good enough at execution?
When can I know that it is a good time to leave this org?
I was mentoring 2 APMs at different times and both were facing a similar struggle as yours. They came with a certain notion of how Product Management should be and found their own experience quite different.
The thing is the APM role is more about execution. It's about how fast you can execute, and solve problems. It is also about helping your leads with Product Discovery and that requires data analysis. Ideas by themselves don't mean much in PM. Sure, in startups or orgs where PMs can have more agency, PMs are incentivised to ship more features so they come up with an idea list. You probably find yourself in this org at the moment. But in more mature companies and where stakes are higher, you need to do adequate product discovery and be able to influence higher ups about why yours is the most pressing and impactful problem to solve. You may not get this immediately at the APM level so you'll need to grow into that role and build your reputation.
Do you have any tips on how I can influence the higher ups?
This has been my experience:
I have hope that even this org might transition from being a feature factory. The larger product (business vertical itself) that I have been working on now, was earlier started from scratch by the PMs and SPMs above me, so naturally, there was a lot of copying from the incumbents. (I get the "don't reinvent the wheel" idea)
However, now, that product has actually started to get some market share, unfortunately the data and insights that I retrieve vs what is shown to the upper management are almost always radically different. It is tailored to the middle management's appraisal needs and with the upper management's egos. For eg: if there's a data point that goes against the CEO's "instinct" in the last review, it is getting shot down. Any subsequent feature from that insight, no matter how big the opportunity seems, gets shot down.
It feels like them nitpicking data to prove just their opinion.
You are probably in the wrong org in this case. Most mature product teams have moved from having Number of features shipped as KPIs to PnL/Adoption/Revenue goals as KPIs. What this means is that we’ve stopped mindlessly shipping things and the focus is on how can we make the best product out there, while increasing revenue significantly. This is in a B2B SaaS org though, and B2C might be slightly different.
Remember that APM is an execution focused role and unless you nail this aspect, you’ll never be able to graduate to product discovery and strategy. I had the same conundrum when I joined, and my manager gave me this simple framework: Execution -> Delegation -> Discovery. You cannot skip any of the steps, and will have to grow through each of them.
@Kachori did you check this?
Just saw the post. Thanks for tagging me
lite le bro ! thinking about this stuff on Dec 24th says you are on right track. I have fundamentally never understood why do you want to push folks to work, they are getting paid to work, you are not their boss to decide whether to work or not. Get a timeline for delivery, if its not done, just call it out.
You definitely sound like you're from KGP or BITS and Blr for sure haha.
The culture in the org that I am at is a bit peculiar (but I don't have any other reference).
We as executing PMs are expected to push people to work even when they have committed to an ETA. This is probably because historically (it has happened to me once or twice now), the owning tech team usually does not call out any potential delays until the last minute. And that is because they know that if they call it out early, they will be shut down by their managers (who are influenced by the PMs).
So it's a cycle now. Developer (or designer) gives an exaggeratedly unrealistic ETA (because they know Product will push). They are then pushed down by Product (ft. their managers at times) to cut down on that aggressively. Now, they just (disagree but) commit to an unrealistic ETA, knowing that some delay can later be attributed to something that Product (and senior management) cannot grasp/question (like architectural issues, vendor delays etc).
This has been an equilibrium for now. Now because I am on the ground between all of this. Life seems like a double agent. Tech is all day aware and talking about how a feature can in no way be shipped on the committed deadline. The product is confident (but somewhere definitely aware of otherwise) in front of management that the feature is getting shipped on the committed dates.
unpopular opinion but it is ok to start with execution..remember it is a journey .. you should be happy to be given this opportunity..you will get to what you want to do .. and when you look back you will be glad that you have gone through the execution part .. it will give you more confidence when you are in strategy and planning
As of now for every decision you are asked to execute just ask yourself ‘Why’
And ‘ Why now ‘
And ‘ how could it be better ‘
Basically keep the curiosity on and make the best of the learning phase .. It is this questioning ability that makes PM
All the best
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