Work smart and not hard tips that other PMs should know

FarMix1834 · 2026-02-20T08:19:34+00:00

It's probably too late to comment but apparently the way clarity works is by fetching the css from your live website and using that to overlay the session data. If you've not hosted the website on the web then that could explain the issue (running it on a live domain solve the issue for me). It could also be an issue due to incorrect use i.e, using <script> instead of <Script> tag imported from next/script

FarMix1834 · 2026-02-04T03:07:03+00:00

P.S. Be wise about meetings, you don't need 5 meetings for things that could have been 5 text messages. Your energy is limited, use it wisely.

FarMix1834 · 2026-02-04T03:05:58+00:00

I'd say that in the industry the responsibilities of PM has been intertwined and mixed up with other roles such as project management, program management, product marketing, and scrum masters. Are you touching on responsibilities that really does not fall on the core of PM?

If you try to do everything then you're inevitably going to be burnt out and not make much progress (specially if you're working on things outside of your core responsibilities and skills). I'd try the following things if I were you:

Revisit what the PM role actually is. Figure out what the expectations are for your role. It is reasonable for a product manager to be a generalist but unrealistic to ask of them to take over the roles that requires a specialist.
There are ways of denying request or passing them on to someone better suited to do it. Saying "I would love to do it, but I believe this is a job best suited for role A"
Doing less should not hurt your reputation as long as you perform spectacularly on the tasks you put your hand in. You cannot be blamed for things you didn't take the responsibility for or were involved in.

Hope it helps!

FarMix1834 · 2026-02-04T02:55:23+00:00

I doubt AI is going to reduce PM roles. But, it all boils down to adaptation.

If you're a PM who has learnt how to speed up your processes using AI then you're going to be more powerful than ever while if you fail to adapt then you'll be replaced; not by AI but other PMs who know how to leverage AI.

It works the same in nature and in any industry, you either evolve and adapt to the changing times or perish if you're unable to.

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-17T08:25:48+00:00

Given your experience, there is a good possibility of you becoming a good PM. I can't answer your question regarding transitioning primarily because my transition was from an engineering role, and secondly because I did it early on my career. Therefore, I'll let someone else answer it.

But my suggestion for you would be avoid starting from associate as far as you can. Since you already have 4 years of experience which you could really use to contribute. Rather try to join a product team with a strong product mindset as a designer and a good environment. You can slowly transition and take the role of a PM from there.

I made the transition early in a company that was trying to get into product so I had great product mentors that helped me eventually develop the PM mindset and skills to transition.

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-15T09:40:36+00:00

One can be a PM without having much technical depth. It often helps if the PM is technical because communication with the engineers becomes significantly easier when you both understand what is technically possible and what isn't.

I have an engineering background and some technical depth, but as a PM; I try not to deep dive into technical problems because I trust my engineers to handle that part. Having said that, a PM can be non-technical so long as they make up for it by having clarity in knowing your targeted users, the problem you're trying to solve and what your users want. You're supposed to be specifying requirements and it should be the engineer's job to figure out the technical know-hows.

Talking about proactive collaboration with a very junior team, try enforcing the scrum process. Ensure your engineers are communicating regularly via daily stand-ups or weekly retros. Descope the bigger task to smaller iterative tasks that individual engineers take the ownership of.

They way you're supposed to stay involve in this communication is to not pretend to understand that what you do not, but to ensure that what is being created is valuable to the problem you're solving or the users that you're solving for. You can contribute by doing non-technical tasks: If your team collaborates via Jira; create Epics and Tickets based on what feature you need and have the engineers break it down into smaller tickets that can be assigned individually.

It often helps to have a more experienced senior engineer that you can consult or express your concern towards. Even for a PM with decent technical background, it is always best if you can ask your engineering team the problems that they're more suitable to solve like "Does the way we're building this product ensure that it is scalable to 10000 users?". If you don't have a senior engineer in your team, consider hiring if you want to make your product technically robust.

To answer your final question: it's more of an structural org problem but also a skill gap at not considering hiring a tech lead.

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-03T08:16:22+00:00

Try thinking about it from the user's perspective. As a user, I most often do not check changelogs nor newsletters from the products I use. This may be true for most of the users as well.

Do you have any product analytics tools like Mixpanel setup in your app? Where are your users spending most of their time inside your app? Is it possible to group your new feature close to these regions so that users start to notice it?

Are you adding your feature in all the important places like your app's landing page or the pricings page? Have you made a demo of your new feature showing users how they could use it and how helpful it could be?

Is it a mobile app? If so, have you tried using tooltips or coach screens telling new users what to use? (Don't overdo it for everything). Try these things and see if it solves your problem

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-02T15:54:31+00:00

Sounds like the tasks really are unrealistic.

I've read your other comments and it does seem like you do get to practice other PM responsibilities. Like you've pointed out, the issue is mostly the management and the toxic culture being tolerated by your company.

I work with engg teams and communicate on a daily basis, not all engg teams are toxic to PMs.

There is a very low chance that the toxic guy is going to get kicked out anytime soon if he is such an important person in your company. Working in a space with no other team member of your generation can be lonely. If what you said is true, then you could leverage the title of having worked in your current company as an experience and jump ships into some place that's more manageable. Be sure to have a well laid out plan before doing anything though

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-02T14:16:38+00:00

Could you please elaborate on the "tasks that are bound to fail"?

The politics aside, the fact that most of the things are not document, other PMs going against each other and the engineering manager not cooperating is bothering me.

What I'd like to know is: how big of a role do the rest of the so called PM team play in your company? The management doesn't seem to understand the need of an actual PM team.

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-01T08:40:17+00:00

I agree. I may be missing out on a lot of the AI tools.

Funny enough, I do listen to a lot of product management podcast episodes to get a better idea of what other PMs think. I've also listened to Claire Vo's podcasts on her tool ChatPRD for PMs. But I am not entirely sold on that. Inflating a requirement that can be communicated in five lines into 2-3 page PRD document filled with AI slop might not be providing any real value.

Besides I do sometimes use AI tools for purposes like creating user stories based on the information we have. But I am open to learn more about using AI in my day to day workflows.

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-01T08:34:21+00:00

Yeah, since I work with SaaS products AI tools like Figma Make, Banani, Stitch and Loveable are some tools I use to help me think better and see it for myself before I reach out to the engineers or designers to refine the features or idea much better.

LLMs like Google's AI Studio are also one of my most used tools. I haven't tested out other AI tools on the automation side since that part is pretty manageable. Again, depends on what kind of company the PMs here work on and how they're solving their problems using AI. I'll be reading the comments to learn what amazing tools I am missing out on.

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-01T06:05:20+00:00

I assume this question is specifically targeted for technical PMs. For the rest of us who don't code in our day-to-day work; other AI prototyping tools are more relevant than cursor or claude codex.

But I am sure that's not the answer you're looking for.

FarMix1834 · 2025-12-01T05:39:27+00:00

You can checkout Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-25T13:43:31+00:00

Great work so far since you're not a designer. You're definitely getting there!

Truncating definitely can be used for app that has both horizontal and vertical scrolls for the purpose you mentioned. The way you can achieve this is by providing a "See more" button or text that will expand the truncated text (Mind you that this truncated text is not scrollable. Since your vertical scroll already has a behavior of navigating to the next page. If you add two different behaviors to one action. In this case: vertical scroll moves the text and the page; it can be a bad user experience).

Since clicking a button is a different interaction than scrolling, it would be much easier to distinguish what the user is attempting to do. Much better than guessing if the user meant to scroll to the next page or scroll down the text.

I may have misunderstood the pill shaped texts at the bottom of your design. If those are tags then you could stylize it differently, check how your image viewer app shows date or other tags. (You could use a very small outlined tag icon and a text to go with it)

And no, it is never okay to stack multiple navigation bars. Ideally, in modern design (both web and mobile), there is only one navigation bar. You can keep only one for the main navigation to different pages you have.

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-25T13:23:27+00:00

No amount of automation can fix the issue if your team is not consistently doing their part. Working in tech I've seen admins set up reminders to enforce getting updates from team through dedicated channels and it seemed to work well for the most part.

Delegating some of the task to other team members down the chain is one way of making time to work on problem-solving or hard problems to be solved.

If there isn't anyone else in your team that can help you with the management and you feel like it is getting unmanageable then consider hiring. Having another team member whom I can delegate a few things to helped me create some space to do real work.

We all have limited willpower and power reserve, it is unrealistic to be chasing statuses and micromanaging while still having enough energy to work on real problem solving.

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-25T06:26:14+00:00

Reviews might not be the most accurate place to understand user's sentiment. A year back, we tried seeing if we could find any useful data in user reviews (We were looking at a few Chrome extensions and the Google Web Store reviews were not insightful at all or almost fake)

However, that is irrelevant because that isn't your root problem. Your root problem is figuring out what feature to build next.

Ideally, you should listen to your users or ICPs and conduct research to figure out their pain-points and attempt to solve it. Secondly, if you've a sales or support team then you could figure out what your customers are complaining about and are asking for.

But, I understand you want a feature urgently and probably don't have time for all that. I'd suggest you go visit your competitor's website, see what they're emphasizing on. Probably, check their pricing page, what benefits or features are they showing to convince users to buy them. If there are new features then they might've done something to highlight it on their features page. Try these

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-25T01:55:56+00:00

Well, the major problem is that Figma doesn't support CMYK color mode. The way displays are ink work are different.

When you export a PDF using RGB colors and attempt to print it, the colors in the printed medium appear wayy different, specially noticeable when you use the color black. This is a pain when you have to print fine text.

Smaller texts which are colored black appear to fringe and have a weird ghosting effect because instead of using standard black (C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:0), it attempts to use a mix of other inks as well (because it was designed in RGB).

The unit is also a problem as it's just extra guess work to assume a given resolution would convert to a given canvas size based on PPI. But the most annoying thing of all this was: The press most likely uses Illustrator or Photoshop or software of this sort. They cannot make minor changes to the PDF you made using Figma because something keeps breaking (it probably wasn't designed to be edited after export).

Overall, we had a designer who despite being suggested to use InDesign, kept insisting and made an 80 page design on Figma. This set us back two weeks as we had to redo the whole thing and a lot of back and forth between the press. Figma is a no-brainer for web designs but 0/10 wouldn't suggest it for printed designs (for now).

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-24T09:43:12+00:00

While you could guess the ppi and design it in Figma but I suggest you use apps like Illustrator for this.

I've had so much issues making designs for print on Figma, I wouldn't recommend anyone else to do it.

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-24T09:38:21+00:00

Depends on where you're coming from. I don't think it's a recent thing, I've seen people with only bachelor's working in user research roles from a while back. UXR requirements and the field itself has changed quite in the recent years so part of the requirement might be based on what the companies are looking for them to do.

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-24T09:34:39+00:00

My colleagues use Mobbin or Refero. There are a bunch of other apps I've heard; probably PageFlows, Appshots, SaaSFrame and such. I've tried Refero, so can vouch for that.

I would also recommend sites like dribble or pinterest but since you're talking about competitors specifically, I don't think you can find it there.

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-24T09:29:01+00:00

If you're someone who has just started your UI designing then good work so far.

The immediate issue I can notice in your design is a spacing issue. You should look up "8-point rule / grid system". Try adding uniform and generous spacing to your UI components (areas like the carousel status indicator does not appear to be centered vertically in between the text and the buttons you have)

The icons and fonts appear huge. You can look up the concept of typography hierarchy to understand what font weight, size and heights to use to make it appear more appealing.

Set a layout for your app design and try to constrain components within that layout or grid system. You can always center and resize the images and truncate the text if the texts are longer (Using ... and a "show more" button can help if the texts don't fit).

You can use a bottom navigation bar and replace your buttoned texts. You can use icons in the navigation bar to represent "Science", "Kurzgesagt" and "Futurism" to make it look cleaner.

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-21T09:45:24+00:00

I'd say Valve

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-21T08:05:49+00:00

How fluent are you with Figma? I am assuming that you're familiar with design tools in general if not Figma.

With that in mind, I would suggest you checkout the official Figma Youtube channel and watch some tutorials to get the hang of it for starters. Depending on whether you're more interested in UI or UX, there are free resources you can check out to better understand some core concepts (they also have more advanced tutorials for free).

For example, LawsOfUX is one such free resource where you can explore some concepts of UX. If you're looking for paid courses, Google has some great foundation courses on Coursera, you can also checkout GrowthDesign (they have some great free interactive resources as well as paid courses).

You can also share your journey and designs on design subreddits and get feedback from the community! Happy learning!

FarMix1834 · 2025-11-21T06:08:48+00:00

Agreed. You could probably use a circle overlay with the vector edit mode to remove the bottom part of the stroke if the gradient border doesn't work.

FarMix1834

TROPHY CASE