In my decade-long journey navigating the realms of FAAMG giants and pre-IPO startups, I've encountered a multitude of Product Managers (PMs) ensnared in a web of stress, dissatisfaction, and an overwhelming urge to seek new horizons due to challenges with their current roles.
But what exactly delineates a great PM job? Let's delve into the intricacies of what constitutes an exemplary PM role and how companies can endeavor to retain their prized PM talent.
1. Dedicated eng team with frontend (app + web engineers)
Being a PM without an eng team is a farce. These roles are highly ambiguous, without no line of direct impact/delivery in sight and no way of attributing success back. Often times there are competing PMs with engineering teams who are actually delivering value. These roles tend to feel more like Program or initiative management. These roles can be high visibility, high accountability roles without much power in the organization to move the needle. Often times, these roles tend to be on the chopping block first and lead to the greatest frustrations.
Yet, these positions are everywhere. These positions tend to have the highest attrition.
PMs need to build and deliver features that impact users. This is impossible without engineers (or “ops” or “tech design” - people who release features). A magical ratio is 7:1 engineers to a PM.
2. Dedicated design analytics, & user research team members
Although lack of design works for certain backend teams, most those PMs end up in the position of needing to ask other teams for support to make impact. They end up in the same position as PMs without dedicated eng.
Similarly, analytics are critical for good prioritization and experiment analysis. PMs who are shipping lots of features don’t have time to write SQL queries and build dashboards.
Finally, working to do user research (UXR) on your own as a PM is time traded off with other activities. Discovery and usability testing are sciences best performed by experts. Also easy to lose credibility even after going the extra mile the experimental feature fails, its easy to say that the hypothesis was incorrectly built because of lack of thorough user research.
Most PMs need at least half a resource of design, analytics, & user research. PMs doing these jobs trades off with driving execution, developing strategy, and bringing along the company. This causes PMs to either underperform or work long hours - driving attrition.
3. PMing a backend team or ML/AI team
While PMs can be successful in backend and AI teams, but these roles can be very hard to deliver on. Backend and AI teams generally have a lot of technical complexity and have Staff/Senior engineers for technical direction and strategy. Most of big tech companies hire/promote high agency engineers with direction/strategy sense to Staff roles. It becomes very hard for PMs to demonstrate value in those scenarios that engineers cannot bring to the table making the role less essential compared to user facing frontend teams. Backend teams can be user facing too and the users can be other developers. These kind of PM roles are platform PM roles. Generally engineer to PM converts in the team are happier in these roles compared to external PM hires for whom the rampup curve can be steep.
4. Lack of clear charter and ownership
Often times teams have overlapping charter. For eg : retention can be part of growth and also engagement. Lack of proper org structure is far too common leading to lack of clarity of goals, collaboration nightmares, resourcing prioritization, unpredictability of roadmap, leading to lots of frustration.
5. PM can be a lonely role
A PM role is all about bringing everyone together : engineering, design, user research, partner teams, etc. Yet the PM role can be lonely as no one role has this full view and at the same time shares all the frustrations described above.
6. Working for a great line of product leadership
There is no formal training for product management. (The few that exist are not to standard.) Most PMs have to learn on the job.
As a result, leadership matters. Great product leaders teach specifically via feedback, 1:1s, and career sessions. They also teach by example. Decisions aren’t made by gut, but by discovery. Features aren’t graduated just because, but due to metrics.
Bad product leadership, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. It’s not uncommon to find product leaders who haven’t even been individual contributor PMs. They can rarely coach how to execute and influence. They don’t have the context.
7. Empowered to determine your own roadmap and strategy
Product managers who are glorified project managers rarely stay. Yet, this is all too common. PMs are handed roadmap and strategy by execs.
On the other hand, there are few thrills quite like leading an empowered product team. These PMs feel empowered to make an impact and change the world.
8. Collaborate with supportive cross-functional colleagues
Often, it’s an influential sales team blaming the product team. Other times, it’s marketing, partnerships, finance, analytics, design, or legal. Whomever the culprit, once other functions point the finger, PMs leave.
If you are a PM struggling with some of these issues, feel free to drop me a note with your story. Happy to advice.
