Loved reading this version of your career story! I also started as a Presales consultant, and I’m stealing your phrasing of “developed my business intuition and broadened my understanding of industries” because it’s SO TRUE.
I became a PM for an internal product at my company because I was a very vocal user of the product. I invested a lot of time in doing UAT and writing up detailed feedback as a user, pointing out errors in the output they were delivering to users (employees) that would have cascading effects for our business. Senior leadership invited me to become a PM for them and “help them fix it” so I came in with guns blazing. I regret it now; I didn’t really understand the environment that everyone was trying to deliver in, where leadership prioritized the quantity of launch announcements sent out in a quarter and never looked at the number of tickets users cut pointing out discrepancies and errors. I just thought that the team didn’t care enough, and that was why there were so many mistakes. Looking back, I think this belief was one of many obstacles to me being able to effectively collaborate with the team, which has resulted in me not being able to have the kind of influence that I wanted to have. When I look back at what I’ve accomplished in my time here, I feel pretty disappointed.
I have been trying my best with this job for nearly 3 years. It’s starting to take a real toll on my mental and physical health. I am trying to leave, but I can’t decide whether I should try to be a PM somewhere else, go back to what I was doing before (analytics and people management), or get out of tech altogether. I’m very unhappy in this job, but I can’t tell if it’s the PM role itself, or the team (since this is the only context I’ve ever known for the PM role). Do you have any advice on how to disentangle those threads? I worked so hard to get my “technical” job title, and it came through so recently. I feel like it would be stupid to walk away from it now.
Hello, thank you for this comment. This is exactly what I am talking about - "over-ownership of the Product", where we feel like the only satisfaction for us as PMs comes from improving the product. My only advice to you which I also mention in the article is to start thinking holistically about the role - Does your leadership trust you? Do your stakeholders listen to you? Do people want to work with you? - weigh these things while balancing the factor of - Is your product moving towards improvement? . You may not be able to solve every discrepancy at one shot but slowly be moving towards it, each Org has its priorities beyond your control, and that is totally okay. If you're able to internalize this, you'll be able to succeed as a PM.
Loved reading this version of your career story! I also started as a Presales consultant, and I’m stealing your phrasing of “developed my business intuition and broadened my understanding of industries” because it’s SO TRUE.
I became a PM for an internal product at my company because I was a very vocal user of the product. I invested a lot of time in doing UAT and writing up detailed feedback as a user, pointing out errors in the output they were delivering to users (employees) that would have cascading effects for our business. Senior leadership invited me to become a PM for them and “help them fix it” so I came in with guns blazing. I regret it now; I didn’t really understand the environment that everyone was trying to deliver in, where leadership prioritized the quantity of launch announcements sent out in a quarter and never looked at the number of tickets users cut pointing out discrepancies and errors. I just thought that the team didn’t care enough, and that was why there were so many mistakes. Looking back, I think this belief was one of many obstacles to me being able to effectively collaborate with the team, which has resulted in me not being able to have the kind of influence that I wanted to have. When I look back at what I’ve accomplished in my time here, I feel pretty disappointed.
I have been trying my best with this job for nearly 3 years. It’s starting to take a real toll on my mental and physical health. I am trying to leave, but I can’t decide whether I should try to be a PM somewhere else, go back to what I was doing before (analytics and people management), or get out of tech altogether. I’m very unhappy in this job, but I can’t tell if it’s the PM role itself, or the team (since this is the only context I’ve ever known for the PM role). Do you have any advice on how to disentangle those threads? I worked so hard to get my “technical” job title, and it came through so recently. I feel like it would be stupid to walk away from it now.
Hello, thank you for this comment. This is exactly what I am talking about - "over-ownership of the Product", where we feel like the only satisfaction for us as PMs comes from improving the product. My only advice to you which I also mention in the article is to start thinking holistically about the role - Does your leadership trust you? Do your stakeholders listen to you? Do people want to work with you? - weigh these things while balancing the factor of - Is your product moving towards improvement? . You may not be able to solve every discrepancy at one shot but slowly be moving towards it, each Org has its priorities beyond your control, and that is totally okay. If you're able to internalize this, you'll be able to succeed as a PM.