Everybody Hates the Product Manager — Good

If people like you, you’re doing it wrong

Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

It’s tough to break into Product Management. And it’s a wonder that anyone even tries, because man does everybody hate the product manager. Just like Chris, but totally the opposite of Raymond.

Product managers are almost universally hated — and with (good?) reason. They just don’t get it. They make a lot of excuses. They never deliver, and when they do, it’s the wrong feature. And don’t get me started on how poorly they iterate, descope, estimate, roadmap, and “prioritize” their “backlog”.

Being a PM is an almost impossible job by definition. You’re supposed to somehow keep all these disparate sets of people happy, and they all want different things. Not just different — sometimes the exact opposite.

• The app is too slow, but there’s no money to spend on addressing scalability issues, and the continuing expense of upsizing the cloud infrastructure can’t be justified either
• CSAT is down, but you can’t prioritize those core usability features which you know will resolve a slew of the primary complaints because leadership is busy chasing some shiny object
• Velocity is trending downward, but that’s because engineers are overworked, but you can’t let them take vacation because low…