My sufferings being a product manager

It's been officially 6.5 years that I have been doing product management as my main job. I hardly ever had any joy during that time. The main reasons are as follows:

1. Stakeholder management is really really exhausting

The graph below represents how many stakeholders the product manager needs to deal with on a daily basis. Based on the company size, some of the stakeholders are not necessarily within the reach of a PM but generally, the most frequently communicated stakeholders are engineers, sales, customers, marketing, and of course the CEO of the company.

I worked in China for 4 years and 2 years in Finland. The difference is huge. In China, PM mostly deal with engineering team on everyday development status update and refine product requirements. But in Europe, PM needs to be involved more frequently with internal stakeholders like customer or sales. I would roughly say about 60% of the daily tasks are about communication and synchronizing with internal stakeholders. And this is where the challenge comes from. Everyone has a say about what the software should look like or what functionalities they are expecting. As a PM, sometimes I need to politely listen to all those voices without showing a direct rejection that says "Hey your opinion doesn't matter". And the organization and management of those opinions are always a chaotic and tiring process. On the one hand, you need to keep track of all the voices and who said that, on the other hand, you can't just simply take all the voices as valid input for your product strategy planning. Deciding which requirement to prioritize is the most difficult and important part of a product manager's core competitiveness. I have to say with pity that I don't think I have this competitiveness. So I often find myself feeling exhausted from all the loud voices near my ear or in front of my eyes. Not to mention when people find out their amazing ideas haven't been adopted into product development, they become frustrated. And I am really tired of explaining to different stakeholders why your request has not been taken into consideration.

2. Succesfully shipping a product is not your credit, but on the contrary, it's your fault

This is about a sense of accomplishment in my work. I know it sounds a bit naive to seek for sense of accomplishment from working and people always say you need to find joy and accomplishment in life. I can't, ok. I have a workaholic spirit and I really value my work as a big part of my life. And sometimes without my job title, I don't even know how to introduce myself. I have worked 6 years in this role and I can say I hardly had the experience of successfully launching a quality product on time that fulfills the needs of our client. I did once actually. I pushed really hard myself and my team to launch a new product to make it on time to demo at a marketing event. Of course, I was very proud of myself but eventually, my line manager didn't say anything about the on-time delivery nor about the come-as-promised quality. 1 month later, we were about to launch a beta version of the product. 1 week before the launch, there were still a lot of bugs in the product, and we didn't have a QA engineer in the team. I tried my best to test the product within my limit and based on my understanding of user flows. But I was still accused and blamed a lot that why the product quality was so bad only 1 week before launch. At that moment, I could hardly ever find any argument to fight back because I was just speechless.

The same things happened multiple times in multiple companies. In conclusion, I think I am the type of person who can't bear being criticized on things that I don't think are my fault. But being a product manager, means you are going to be critised a lot on every aspect of the product. There is a bug in the product? PM's fault. The product didn't release on time as promised? PM's fault. The design is not in line with what the client wanted? PM's fault. The product is not making as much profit as expected? PM's fault. The customers are very frustrated about the product? PM's fault. Those criticisms became knives that stabbed me every time when I got involved in any drama. So I am really done with it.

3. The CEO always has something to say about the product and it's hard to say no

Maybe this is my lack of communication skills. But it happens very often that the CEO wants a crazy idea and the PM is the first person to be contacted in this context. I had one working experience where the CEO was pretty "creative". He could had an idea A today and asked to be delivered immediately. And the next day he said he changed his mind and he wants idea B. Because the CEO found it difficult to communicate with the engineering team directly he needs a muppet to voice out his ideas. And that muppet was me. It's not like I haven't fought against this irregular product requirement input. Of course, I want to have my own planning for the product and short-term, and long-term strategy. But everything was in vain when the CEO was very aggressive and constantly threatened you that "you are only here to deliver my ideas, otherwise you have no value". I still want to keep my job and earn some living to pay my rent. So I can't say no.

I thought things would be different in Finland. But similar things happened again in my working experience in Finland. I had a line manager who really liked to obey and follow the commands from the CEO and I hardly ever had any say about what's my idea or opinion about anything. Probably this also originated from at that time I was lack of self-advocacy and was unaware of microaggressions. Previous traumas about not obeying commands of the CEO or line managers came back in this situation. All I can do is follow the command and do the job. This calls back to point number 2 where when the product was shipped successfully, it's not my credit. But when it went somehow wrong, it was all my fault. And I really can't take it anymore.

4. I am not an expert at anything but I need to pretend that I am

You can say it's my fault that I didn't become an expert in my domain. The truth is I spent a large amount of time in all the industries that I worked in. I have worked in the marketing domain, human resource domain, cyber security domain, procurement domain, and now it's mental health domain. Every time when I got into a new industry, I always studied and took notes on the terminologies and read books, took courses. But those won't necessarily instantly make me an expert, isn't it? But as a product manager, especially in the B2B industry, it's important to have this sense of expertise in your saying. I suffered so much every time I needed to do my presentation for clients who had more than 20 years of experience in the industry and I needed to be able to showcase why my product could help them have a better life. I don't know if our product can make their life better or not ok?

Partially related to this, I feel like I need to constantly lie in my job as a product manager. It often happens when I find out the product I was responsible for is nothing but a pile of codes that barely creates value. And I need to advocate for this product to tell our customers "Hey this is a really innovative and great product, why not pay 200k to see how little value you can get from it? ". I am just born as an honest and direct person and I can't hypnosis myself this is great; this is amazing; this is what they need. This also happens especially in Finland, where the development pace is really relaxed and chill. We promised we would have the new version released in June and eventually, it was released in December. I need to use tricks to inform the customer and sales team that "ok the product is coming soon but no exact date, don't let the customer sneak away“. I guess I am just really bad at embracing uncertainties and I have been so used to Chinese working culture that when we say it will be delivered in June, it will be delivered in June.

I am done with lying.

To summarize this length venting blog, I have suffered a lot working as a product manager. But it's been 6 years that I can't ignore and pretend they never existed before. What's the next step in my professional life? I don't have an answer yet, but figuring out what I didn't like in a job at least helped me to navigate in a more clear direction later.

Hope you enjoy reading my blog. Thank you!