Why you should not become a Product Manager
I made a Youtube video about this last week, but for many of you interested in tech and product management, here are some reasons why you may wish to pursue a career other than product management.
Reason #1: You Hate Meetings
60–70% of a product manager’s job is aligning with stakeholders within a company, which means that you are in meetings with different team managers, directors, and VPs and often spend the other 30–40% of your time focused on making decks about the vision of a specific product, writing specs for your team, and doing anything else that needs to be done to keep your team on track such as preliminary data analysis or wireframing. Because of this, you can kind of think of product management as a “business” role that fills the gaps of your engineering team.
If you don’t like meetings, making spreadsheets, working on docs, etc., then don’t become a PM.
Reason #2: You Don’t Like Stress
Every job has its stresses, but it’s a little bit different for PMs since you are responsible for conceptualizing and executing on product features for your engineering team. That being said, you only support your engineers during execution, but they are doing the brunt of the work. Because of that, if a feature launch is successful, the entire team succeeds. If the launch fails, the responsibility falls on the PM’s shoulders.
Additionally, when you conceptualize features, there are a lot of different stakeholders/company leaders/customers that may block you even though you know you are doing the right thing, so it is up to you to navigate any ambiguous circumstances the best way you know how, which can certainly be daunting if you have not done this kind of work before.
Regardless, if you don’t like having any additional pressure, then reconsider becoming a PM.
Reason #3: You Love Your Current Job
It’s underrated, but if you love your current job and can see yourself doing that for the foreseeable future, whether it be in finance, design, data science, or software engineering, you should keep doing it. Talk to PMs you know first before considering making the jump to product management since you may find that you like your current job more than being a PM.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I have found product management to be an incredibly fulfilling career with high impact, high visibility in my company, and I could honestly not do any other job. That being said, if you are looking for high visibility, there are ways to get it in your current role, especially if you move into a management track within your specific domain.
All I can say is do what you love, and as long as you feel like you are making an impact in your current work, that should be reason enough to stick with it.
