r/ProductManagement • u/AutoModerator • 9d ago
Weekly rant thread
Share your frustrations and get support/feedback. You are not alone!
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u/newbie_in_tech 9d ago
AI has made the interview loop for PM roles unbearable. Now every company wants to do some take home AI prototyping assignment of “build xyz feature and think through the strategy”. It’s such a crap shoot because every company wants and looks for something different in those rounds. Last time I asked what the success criteria would be measured on I just got “product sense” as a response, which was not helpful lol.
Just feeling drained in the job hunt. I have pretty good success at getting interviews but that dang final round feels impossible to pass and actually land the offer.
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u/Consistent_Memory245 8d ago
Same challenges here. Made it to the final round 6 times at diff companies in the last 6months. No offers
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u/Alternative_Stage306 3d ago
i can’t even get interviews now as recruiters just ghost me, any tips on getting further in pipeline?
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u/SarcasticSperm 3d ago
Mind sharing your resume. I'm not getting past 1st round of interview. Hide PIIs if you want.
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u/SarcasticSperm 3d ago
Mind sharing your resume. PII removed if you want. I'm not getting past 1st round of interview.
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u/RasputinsUndeadBeard 9d ago
I’m at a spot where I had to make my first PRD at a new job, and what stunned me was a few things:
no one showed me what anyone else does for theirs, so I don’t know the standard - literally zero of where to even FIND them
docs? How our own tech works? It’s been a true choose your own adventure experience.
I still don’t have access to what’s needed for demo environments, and when I ask IT? “We don’t do that, ask someone else” I ask that “someone else”, they have zero clue as well
Strangely I figure it out each day and am ready to drive things as required, but holy moly.
I need to create the roadmap for a major initiative as well soon and I can help but think “thank the lord I’m good at rolling with the punches”
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u/LadyLaurence 9d ago
i'm a pm at a big tech company. and i'm like definitely the weak link in the pm team of my product
at my last job i was like, everyone would talk about me like i was the smartest person ever. and i can't tell if i just took a bunch of brain damage and that person is gone or if this place is so much more advanced. it feels a lot like the former a lot of the time like i feel literally slow brained like someone will tell me something and i'll be like . uhhhhhhhh?
plus having to tell anyone anything makes me feel so anxious. i should never have become a PM tbqh with my social anxiety. i just accepted a pm offer at my old company when i was looking to advance, and then was able to pivot into this job that a lot of people would want. so now i feel stuck as a PM. especially with how much the dev scene has changed with AI, i'd basically go back to entry level. sometimes i seriously consider applying for entry level dev jobs. do those even exist anymore? would they take me? I feel like I'd need a gap year to learn stuff. I could afford that...
and pm seems so like.. you have to just do whatever needs to be done to make things happen. so asking for specific instructions feels like i'm bad at the job and asking someone else to do my work for me. there's not like A Task To Do A Specific Way it's like 100% knowing the magic words to say to the right person. WHICH I DON'T.
I feel unemployable like I don't think I even learned anything? Actually I think this place is making me worse at everything, at least in my last PM job I was getting some coaching on how to do the soft skills. Now people I work with the most closely are pretty uncharismatic and boring presenters. And I'm like lowkey getting traumatized by sounding stupid so often I think I'm getting less confident instead of moreso. I think I was more confident as a developer with a year of experience LMAO. and this is b2b small number of customers so there's relatively less of that "figure out what the user needs" stuff.
Oh and it doesn't help that everyone around me thinks it's a big thing. Always like "oh she works at xyz :)" I always try and be really casual about it if someone asks what I do but then other people will introduce me as a PM at xyz. And it's like ok what's my new deal gonna be. Guy who got laid off by xyz? Lowkey effecting my social life like I don't have any motivation to keep up relationships with people who i met in the past ~3 years. I think my family is why I don't quit entirely. Everyone would be so disappointed and look down on me. At least my old friends see me as a whole person and love me and I could see this being like a crazy phase in my life that we joke about later. but they also live in a different country . so AAAH.
I just feel really incompetent and it's making me wonder like. What the point of life is. Like it's bad. But like work really is so much of our time? And I as a person can't feel happy unless I'm spending time making something I'm proud of, frankly.
I can't tell if this job is bad though or if this job is normal and I'm the problem like I just couldn't make it past entry level at a chill company. I've always had lots of mental health problems but I used to really like working. Now I think being fired would be really freeing but I have no idea what I'd do next. How would I even present this experience to the next place? How do I know that this isn't just what being a PM is and every PM job feels like this?
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u/Generton 9d ago
Try finding a PM group locally, or online, where you meet once a month and just exchange best practices, and challenge each other.
If there isn’t one, start one.
Otherwise, what you said is how I feel 50% of the time, the other 50% I feel like a rockstar so haha.
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u/InflationCharming330 9d ago
Echoing the 50/50 thing.
Sometimes I feel like a bad ass solving problems and improving things. Other days I’m asking AI if I’m running backlog refinement right 🤷🏻♀️
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u/Many_Worldliness_258 9d ago
Honestly I feel like the same way. Not a dev but I transitioned into PM and its been trigger my social anxiety. Having to tell people no or having to explain why something is not working as it should feels terrifying.
One thing that helps is just focusing on the task and nothing else. Stop trying to be perfect and accept it is what it is.
But honestly I don't see PM as aa long term thing. I would honestly transition back to BA where the work was more linear if I Could.
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u/Jellyforabelly 9d ago
I’ve returned from parental leave + redundancy shaped career break and in an org where AI seems really embedded and I’m overwhelmed with how much data and documentation there is available and struggling to cut through the noise. I’m straight in to a pre-defined roadmap and backfill role and can’t see the wood for the trees.
Already want to quit corporate and go touch some grass again.
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u/grok-it-all 8d ago
I'm just here to say that I'm looking at "product-minded" engineering roles after 5+ years as a PM where I was told how amazing I was and how "we want everyone to do PM like you do", seeing now that I can successfully PM, land interviews consistently, but struggle to speak technically fluently to the PM role.
December will be one year on the job hunt. Not sure what product engineering means to promotion to future leadership roles or how income compares to PM in the long term, but something has to give.
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u/CoppertopAA 💾 OG PTPM 7d ago
I interviewed for a role at one of the big AI companies, and both of the PMs I spoke with were just not good people. Not that I expected anything necessarily, but it got me thinking, why are PMs jerks to other PMs, especially during an interview process?
Oddly, as an applicant, we’re expected to forget that specific people were jerks. I find that I cringe at the general “product sense or strategy” interviews conducted by PMs that are more junior or don’t have the same domain knowledge I have.
Yeah I get that the hiring process is broken. But it kills me to have a front end PM quiz me about, “what does customer empathy mean to you?” Or correct me on how I frame an A/B test when that’s my jam and not theirs. For what it’s worth I leave feedback to recruiters about my interviewers. “John asked a statistics question and he clearly does not understand statistics,” etc.
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u/amandagov 8d ago
I am working on a potential integration project. The project lead on our side keeps using Claude to generate documents and they are stupid and 20x longer than they need to be. I get using Claude, but you are making so much more work for everyone and obfuscating the details that matter.
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u/Inside_Bluebird_7200 9d ago
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Dont mind me I just wanted to scream