Please don't be a PM. Seriously.
“If there’s no one else to do it, PM has to do it.”
To be a really good PM, you have to be disciplined, deeply understand the business, excel in politics and relationships, avoid taking things personally, sometimes do the work of others, and often not find much enjoyment in the tasks at hand. Being a PM is a lonely job.
A PM must primarily focus on the buyer, not the user. They must accelerate the achievement of the company’s business goals, contribute to growth and retention, manage problematic customers, and endure criticism from sales for “not delivering things that matter.” Although engineering is responsible for delivery, PMs are always the ones held accountable and escalated to.
The PM role is tough. You’re rarely shielded but often have to shield others. You’re privy to all the strange decisions and thought processes of leadership but can’t share them with your teammates, as it might cause a lack of focus. You have to sift through customer and user needs, saying NO to most of them due to limited resources or different objectives.
PMs must find answers to unresolved questions, which is sometimes almost impossible due to politics and a lack of quality data. You’ll end up spending more time on operations (trying to convince people to do what you need) than on your actual craft (analysis, forecasting, learning the market).
I know some of you, especially those with high agency, see this as a challenge. But please, don’t. Don’t become a PM. Instead, consider being a product designer with a business-oriented mindset or an engineering manager with similar skills.
And even if you might be a great fit for the role, you could end up choosing the wrong company, which could destroy you if you don’t leave. But leaving isn’t easy because breaking into the industry is so difficult, and your CV would make you look like a job hopper.
So, why are other roles a better choice than the PM role?
- You can be more personally attached to the product. PMs have to make more logical decisions based on market and business conditions.
- You see the results of your work 100x more often. Closed a deal? Created a design loved by users, colleagues, and the community? Refactored code, tried a new framework, or delivered something on time? As a PM, this won’t happen often.
- You can be more focused. Unlike PMs, who often have multiple meetings at once and need to go fully offline to do focused work (which usually involves spreadsheets, updates, chasing people on Slack, replying to upset customers, or supporting field roles who don’t fully understand the product), you can concentrate on a specific piece of work.
- You’re shielded from chaotic situations. PMs attend various meetings where they hear crazy ideas, stories, and strategies. Combined with how the PM role is perceived in the community, this can drive you crazy and erode your self-confidence if you don’t know how to escalate issues. As a PD, EM, or in another role, you’re usually shielded by the PM or seen by the company as a “solution/delivery person” rather than the go-to person for everything.
- You can primarily focus on users. This is especially true if you’re a designer or engineer. You can make small tweaks on your own, make users happier, and spend time understanding how things work. In the B2B world, where users ≠ buyers, this makes a huge difference. As a PM, you’ll have to focus on the buyer, which sucks because they don’t care about all the product tweaks. They care about whether you can solve their bigger problem, not about cool features.
- You will have time to fall in love with the solution. You can spend time tweaking it in detail based on user needs. PMs in B2B rarely have the time to do this, and if they do, they’re likely not spending enough time with customers or field teams. Solutioning is a fun game for designers and engineers.
- You can easily recognize “good work.” You can feel proud of a well-done design job or a resolved logical or performance issue in the code. Doing this as a PM is extremely difficult.
- It’s much easier to get promoted. Promotions as a PM require skills that take years to build, unless you’re in a small company. You have to make political moves and manage your optics.
You can be product designer, sales engineer, software engineer or engineering manager. A “bad” PM can actually hurt the product and affect the morale of the team even with the best intentions.
