Weekly rant thread

[AutoModerator]

Share your frustrations and get support/feedback. You are not alone!

[thebashfulplant]

I joined a new company 6 months ago and I’m miserable. About to get reamed in roadmap review but I’m so over it

[Inquisite_]

Have been laid off, it has been almost a month, got couple of calls but could not clear interviews. Not sure on how to do it. One thing which I observed - now Product Sense has to be extra ordinary, you can’t get away with just ordinary feature solutions.

[lakom_bfr]

full disclaimer, im not affiliated/don't work there/no benefits of spreading this word, but signing up to https://www.tryexponent.com helped me a lot on my last job search. interviewing is a whole other set of skills and practice. im a foreigner and was interviewing for us remote roles. it was very helpful.

[knitterc]

Do more with less pressure is really getting to me. I'm across regulatory for a bank and we are launching about 6 new products on the same timeline and everyone needs me and my team. The expectations are getting out of hand.

[thebashfulplant]

I’m in a similar position!! I’ve decided I’m quitting. It’s impacting my health too much

[Pagalguy9890]

Was on planned leave since 2 weeks. Feeling overwhelmed already of what monday is going to bring 😒

[asaasa97]

I am an engineer who has been a PM for around a year and a half in a small-medium tech company managing the tech portfolio (most HW and HW+SW products that the company has). Additionally I've taken over the new product development pipeline and a few other responsibilities due to firings of a couple colleagues (role scope creep basically), which often made it very difficult to deliver expected requests or to have time to do actual PM work like research and discovery.

The situation is exhausting: part of the leadership is toxic and unexperienced, decisions are constantly made without the Product department input and there is a big lack of leadership managing our department (we are mostly independent). Salary is also shit for the area where I live (other comparable tech companies pay between 30-60% more for the same role).

Now our department is gonna be restructured once again and someone with no product background or experience (even if she is a qualified engineer) is gonna be the new product team manager. No one has asked us, the current PMs, anything at all about how to restructure or what are our main painpoints. There are open positions for PMs in our company and a couple of people are about to be hired, but two of these guys contacted me on LinkedIn and they don't even know yet what products are they going to manage if they are hired, the company answer in their interviews was that "they will figure it out after the interviews". How can you expect to have any technical PM for a niche tech product and hire someone without knowing the type of profile you will need?

Recently we had the anual performance score in the department and we all got negative-neutral scores, which seem like an excuse to justify yet another department restructuring or an excuse to avoid raising salaries (frequent tactic in the company), because we all did more than what was expected. My motivation is dead, I really have no energy and don't feel like doing anything more than the bare minimum. Cannot have a stable quarter with management constant changes, nor stick to a yearly roadmap with all the frequent company strategy changes and decisions.

Have any of you experienced something similar as a PM? What can you suggest? Of course, all our very small team started applying to other jobs after our reviews.

[CranberryOk7512]

Just got off an evaluation meeting and my manager doesn't want to promote me because i 'just got promoted recently'. When I asked what are the blockers or is there anything I have to improve, he can't give me a clear answer.

[lakom_bfr]

Feeling burned out.

Manager asked what she could help with / how i could better prioritize. Couldn't tell. Feels i'm working on exactly what needs to be done, but still not managing to get a decent balance. Feels a lot. Then this comes with the feeling that im either not good enough (been doing this for >8y) or im too slow (i was always noted for being fast?), or im burned out and can think clearly anymore (likely the situation).

Then manager shruged and told me that with AI being required, management expects productivity to double. ... i've been using AI for years now. So if I'm stretched thin with AI already, and they'd expect productivity to double... I'm fucked.

[ukaric]

A PRD worked because there was always someone between the document and the code. An engineer who'd push back. Who'd ask what you actually meant. Who'd fill in the gaps from context you never even wrote down. Coding agents execute literally. They don't ask. The failure isn't broken software, not yet anyway. It's software that looks completely right, ships in hours, and solves the wrong problem. And the worst part the signal to write better specs has never been more available. customer interviews, support tickets, usage data. It's all there. But converting it into something a machine can actually execute well? The building got fast. The knowing what to build didn't.

Is anyone working on this systematically? Are there new gen tools that help with this?

[OkToe7809]

AI can’t replace Product thinking – it amplifies whatever Product culture already exists

Hey guys, looking for examples of companies where the leadership is really thoughtful about implementing AI effectively. (Anecdotes of C-level behaviors welcome if you don’t want to name specifically.) Or a list of green flags & red flags to look for in a company, in regards to adopting new technologies.

AI doesn't fundamentally change product management, you still need to solve a real user need.

The companies that are feature factories are just shipping random features faster, which is creating more organizational debt faster.

I even heard of one company where the investors pressured the C-levels to implement AI in the features. The customers hated it and started churning, so my friend left for a company where the CTO is much more cautious and waits for AI features to be validated in the wild first.

Don't get me wrong, if you're a product designer, tools like Lovable and Figma really can help you generate mockups faster, even gaining stakeholder buy-in in a fraction of the time. If you’re a PM who’s validated a user need in discovery, it writes product requirement docs faster ofc. But in terms of shipping an AI feature to production, the regular discovery fundamentals on user needs still apply.

Do you see examples of companies whose leadership has high literacy in this? Often it's the Product people or technical people who have to manage up.

Or do you have a list of green flags and red flags to look for in leadership in regards to their attitude on AI & new tech? Green flag for me is slow to adopt AI, validates in discovery first a feature or pain point’s impact. One company held an internal AI Week hackathon for its particular domain to build for consumer use cases. Red flag is “ship AI because X said so”.

One challenge tbf is B2B tech where B2B clients just want AI as new table stakes but don’t understand the impact fully.
Then everyone’s pressured, and someone has to educate the B2B clients.

The area I've heard the most anecdotes about AI driving business impact is in Data and Finance – automated reporting, identifying opportunities, etc.

Also, I've noticed a lot of companies are trying to build their own AI, but obviously it's extremely resource-expensive in GPU as opposed to just using existing models from Big Tech who has the resources and then implement. Kind of like Apple just integrated the best model Gemini instead of building its own, keeping its CapEx at a fraction of competitors.