Why are product managers unhappy?
Trigger warning: this post has nothing to do with AI.
Wait, are PMs unhappy?
A meme from Lenny’s Newsletter.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people in tech, including many PMs. Not all, but many of them spoke about managing frustration at work. To see if my suspicion was part of a larger trend, I turned to the /r/ProductManagement subreddit. I scraped every post and ran a simple sentiment analysis.
Nothing particularly jumps out. Note that the subreddit was much smaller when it started, so naturally there was more variance early on. According to this analysis, the overall sentiment isn’t particularly negative. As a baseline, another subreddit I follow, /r/modular, averages a very similar 52% positive words in the last three months (source).
However, my analysis using the Bing lexicon doesn’t capture the true sentiment of /r/ProductManagement. One of the popular “positive” words was “hug.” Searching the subreddit for “hug” turns up some pretty eye opening posts:
- “I am giving up on my career”
- “I feel like I’m under attack”
- “PM team needs some love”
- “Unfair performance management”
Not particularly uplifting stuff. One user said they left a career in product management to take a quarter of their old salary to become a high school teacher. Something is going on here.
How to be a terrible PM
The most upvoted post in the ten year history of this subreddit, by a landslide, is My Advice on How to Be a Terrible but Valuable PM. Key excerpts:
One of the cruelest lessons I’ve learned as a PM is that success comes in two forms, and they rarely align:
- Being a Good PM – Driving meaningful impact on the business and its KPIs.
- Being a Valuable PM – Ensuring leadership sees you as valuable.
In an ideal world, focusing on #1 should be enough. But in reality, #2 often determines your career trajectory and job stability, regardless of actual impact…
…I'm no longer losing my sanity trying to make a product successful or trying to single-handedly build a productive product culture. I've got an amazing work-life balance.
Professionally, I'm completely dead inside.
Marty Cagan, the pre-eminent product thought leader, has written and spoken extensively about what he describes as “product theater.” He’s describing this.
People who have been frustrated working with PMs—they’re describing this.
This is someone who knows how to do their job, who knows how to help their team succeed—but they can’t win the hearts and minds of leadership, and it’s not in their best interest to try. So instead they become an overpaid project manager and focus on gaming the optics.
There’s an ongoing debate in the comments if this post is satire. I don’t think it is. And even so, satire is always grounded in a truth.
That this post received more than 2x the upvotes versus any other post (source) tells me they’ve hit on something universal for this community of PMs.
Rewind: the three phases of becoming a great PM
Tons of people have jobs that aren’t all that fulfilling. It shouldn’t be a groundbreaking insight to say that playing internal politics helps you succeed in corporate America. Why did this post generate such a response? To understand why PMs are so frustrated, consider how PMs’ careers progress as they become more senior. Every product manager’s career evolves through three phases:
Phase One
The first phase is learning to do the job well. This is all about the nuances of applying design thinking principles in practice, applying the right prioritization framework to the right problem, identifying and keeping customer problems front-and-center, getting good at user research, getting good at project management, getting good at effective communication—there’s a laundry list of skills PMs need.
At some point, the Phase One PM becomes the leader of a successful team. They are doing good work, but there is one big problem: everything flows through the PM. They are a bottleneck for approving designs, making engineering decisions, GTM comms, triaging customer support bugs, and more. A Phase One PM will complain, “I never have time to do strategic work!” “I am in meetings all day!” They are in a vicious cycle, stuck in the weeds and low level details. Enter Phase Two.
Phase Two
Now that the PM is fairly skilled, Phase Two is all about upleveling their team. The Phase Two PM is a coach; after all, the best way to prove you understand all your Phase One skills is to teach them to your team. Phase Two PMs push their designers on UX principles. They shift the engineering culture on their team to become product-minded. They empower everyone in their orbit with shared decision frameworks. They drive a customer-obsessed culture. They teach their team to care about outcomes over outputs.
Culture changes take time, but eventually, they build trust and autonomy. The team is really humming, and the PM is no longer a bottleneck or feeling stuck in the weeds. Now they can focus more of their effort on things only they can do (typically, product strategy).
But now, they realize the biggest bottleneck to their team’s success isn’t coming from within the team…
Phase Three
If you’ve ever had a job, you’ve been frustrated by your boss at some point: An executive who simply wants their idea in the product, ASAP. A leader who can’t make up their mind and pivots so drastically and rapidly, nothing can get done. Misalignment on the cost of quality leading to teams only ever shipping MVPs. Teams being evaluated on “velocity” above all else (”feature factories”).
These scenarios are unavoidable; working with fellow humans is like herding cats. If Phase Two is about managing down the org chart, Phase Three is when PMs need to manage up. Exceptional PMs carve out space for their teams to do incredible work, even if the organization at large is inadvertently hostile to building great software.
(Important note: there is not one way to build great software, but there are a thousand ways to build terrible software.)
Every company is dysfunctional, each in their own way. A PM’s real job is to find the dysfunction, insert themselves directly into it, and slowly correct course. It is an unwritten job description. But this is the primary role of a Phase Three PM.
To be a great PM, it isn’t enough to be able to do the job, you have to be able to empower your team to make product decisions. But that isn’t enough either: you also have to manage up to empower your org to make good product decisions, all the while still executing at a detailed level.
PMs are stuck
The “Terrible but valuable” post tells me PMs are struggling to move from managing down (Phase Two) to managing up (Phase Three).
…PM is turning to shit. I’m trying to pivot into a different career after 8 years because leadership is too abstracted away to tell whether ideas are good or bad and would rather take in the snake oil.
— /u/evergreen39
Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim of their company, like they're stuck in a feature team and there's nothing they can do about it other than quit.
I see four converging factors affecting PMs today:
- What is your job? Job expectations vs reality can lead to sustained frustration.
- Managing up is a skill gap. Many PMs don’t have experience managing up.
- Bottoms-up change is hard. As an individual contributor, your power is limited.
- The struggle is universal. Because of market dynamics, Many PMs are experiencing this painful realization all at once.
What is your job?
Anytime there is consistent tension or misalignment at work, I’ve always found it has to do with mismatched expectations of job responsibilities. If you’re a frustrated PM, there’s a good chance you think your job is defined by what was on the offer letter you signed, something about "developing and executing a comprehensive strategy” or “building a deep understanding of the needs of users,” but you’d be wrong. Your actual job is probably about managing up, slowly winning hearts and minds on the path towards Marty Cagan’s “product operating model.”
Senior PMs know how to do great product work. They also know when the product org at large is shooting itself in the foot. Super senior / Principle / Staff PMs know how to do something about it.
Managing up is a skill gap
I love tech, I love solving hard problems, but I hate the politics.
— Lou, Product Consultant
Managing up is based on strengthening relationships and building trust. For many PMs, there’s a skills gap: the managing-up skills that make someone a great Phase Three PM are skills that they likely didn’t need much in Phase One or Phase Two.
Many leaders I’ve worked with are inherently distrustful of product managers. They’ve worked with bad ones who seem to only stand in the way between engineers and customers. As a PM, execution is your core currency with leadership. If you’re team isn’t executing, and you blame leadership, you’ve earned no trust and you’ve created a dead end for yourself. And if your leader has already been burned by underperforming PMs in the past, you’re starting with a disadvantage.
As remote work became more popular, building strong working relationships became harder. Knowing someone beyond a Zoom meeting is key to being able to have hard conversations, and making hard conversations feel easy is critical to managing up effectively.
Bottoms up change is hard
Marty’s latest book, Transformed, is explicitly geared towards educating leaders on how to adopt the “product operating model”—aka empowering teams to build great software products. He knows leaders are the bottleneck; it’s why he chose to write the book. In it’s entire 435 pages, there is only a single page on what you can do as a IC PM. Marty is saying the important part quietly: As an individual contributor, there isn’t much you can do.
To be explicit: The CEO needs to be viewed as the chief evangelist for the product model [transformation]. If this is something your CEO is unwilling or unable to do, then you can likely save yourself a lot of time, money, and effort by reassessing your readiness [for the product operating model]… While theoretically not impossible, it is extremely difficult to transform successfully without the active support of the CEO.
— Marty Cagan (from Transformed)
In Marty’s view, IC PMs need to hone their craft. The whole thing falls apart if IC PMs aren’t able to execute at a high level. The weight of the transformation—and managing up—falls on product leaders. Unfortunately, product leaders are also susceptible to the grift of becoming seen as “valuable” over all else. So as a IC PM, you’ve got a long road ahead of you.
The struggle is universal
And because of the dynamics of the industry at large, there’s a whole cohort of PMs who are realizing this all at once.
Congratulations, you’ve fully unlocked PM Enlightenment™—the moment when you realize that career success has little to do with actual impact and everything to do with optics. You’ve cracked the code, my friend.
— /u/phil42ip
In the workforce today, more PMs are more senior than ever. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with folks across the tech industry. One of the trends: no one is hiring junior PMs. In fact, some companies were so burned on “product theater” they are adverse to hiring PMs at all (like Posthog).
We are now in the post-ZIRP (zero interest rate phenomenon) world. When money was cheap, growth was easy, and the pandemic was fueling digital engagement, there was a huge influx of hiring. Now there is a generation of tech workers who have been scarred by working with terrible product managers. I’m sure you’ve worked with someone who had a senior title but wasn’t operating as a Phase Three (or even Phase Two) PM. As a correction, a higher percentage of PMs in the workforce today are more senior than in the past.
Additionally, product management as a discipline has been around for long enough that it’s matured. More people than ever know how to do the job really well. There’s a whole ecosystem of PM influencers. Marty Cagan has been writing about building great software products at SVPG for 23 years.
Conclusion
Why are PMs so unhappy? In essence, because they lack agency.
- They are senior enough to know there’s a better way to innovate…
- But they don’t have the skills to change their leaders’ behavior to fix the problem…
- Managing up isn’t the job they thought they signed up for…
- And in many cases, even if they try, they can’t fix the problem…
- And because of market dynamics, many PMs are all experiencing this realization at once.
What’s next? I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom. AI will force many companies to truly innovate, especially after the initial VC money grab winds down. That should push leaders to be more open to change. If Marty is successful, more CEOs and leaders will have heard of the product operating model. And in the meantime, more PMs should hone their skills at managing up (I’ll dig into strategies in a future post).