While I love it when people share their experiences with others, to me the post reads like a monologue from a therapists couch or a slurry voiced commiseration with another PM over their third double scotch.

What I find especially disheartening is that these “realities” of being a PM are positioned as something one should be preparing themselves for rather than challenging.

I’m not going to get into a point by point breakdown but I’d love to highlight a couple reactions to certain statements.

The whole Product Manager as a mini CEO thing.

So many folks tirelessly throw this one around. “That thing they told you about being the mini CEO of your Product is not true”. What they fail to elaborate on is that initially it was just an easy way to describe holistic ownership. Yet most of the times this analogy gets brought up it’s in the context of powerlessness over other peoples actions.

No Product Manager should expect inherent authority, only accountability.

After years of hearing product people describe the job as a mini-CEO role, immediately following it up with “except you don’t get to order people around”, I’d love to see the analogy die in favor of simply saying that a product managers job is about collaborating with the whole company on creating products that people use and love.

In my opinion that statement covers all the same aspects of having to work with everyone on all parts of delivering a solution with the main weapon being communication.

Nobody hates you.

In this day and age a lot more people understand the value a Product Manager brings and nobody should ever see you as a “work giver” as long as you don’t treat them as delivery mechanisms for components of your product.

Animosity will mainly stem from lack of understanding around what people are working on and why.

The suggestion shouldn’t be to “sometimes ship good product”, it should be to constantly inspire.

You will not be squabbling over point estimations or priorities if everyone is marching to the same beat. That beat being a solid understanding and commitment to the vision which you helped explain, evangelize and get buy in for.

You can always build something new.

It just depends on scale. Full product line ownership is indeed rare and will come either with seniority or a dive into entrepreneurship.

Most product people will spend their time working on existing solutions but that should not constrain them to untangling messy implementations or tweaking button colors.

If you’re not ok making single digit percent optimizations on a B2B product line at a 500 person company there is definitely another job for you out there.

And even then if you take a hard look around your organization you will find chances to build new things. A brand new feature. A new partnership. A new acquisition channel. A new sales process. A new customer success story. Even those issues you inherited need new solutions.

At some point you will be able to do all of these new things as a part of a cohesive brand new solution from the ground up, but prior to that you better have learned all of those individual pieces with a safety net of a product put in place before your time.

Be the therapist not the patient.

Lastly I just want to say that even for new PMs the job should be to constantly elevate the level of the game you’re joining. Through leadership, understanding, collaboration and creation of strong personal bonds.

Be ready to explain your thinking and product solutions internally just like you would for the millions out there for whom you’re building your product for.

Unless you’re in a very unhealthy organization there will be a lot more people routing for you if you make them understand that all of the success is shared. Because you’re in it together. Building. Fixing. Shipping.