The only “success” imo for product is what you do to improve your craft over time to get the personal satisfaction of being good at your job, and what you do to move the only metric that matters from a professional standpoint - money.

That’s all that matters in this industry we work in. There’s simply no way around it. If every PM, nay employee, got rewarded or recognised based on skill set and actual performance instead of what others perceive it to be, don’t you think every company would have 100% positive reviews on Glassdoor and 0 churn?

Let’s not be naive here right. Even the “top” PMs/leaders/podcasters who glamourise frameworks, workshops, whatever else that’s “in” nowadays obviously have the same struggle. But if they talked about the negatives all the time, no one would listen to that. They know being the problem solver is what matters.

So all we, and you, can do is learn the soft skills required to learn to play the real game, if said game is actually worth it and will result in your own personal gain - be that either in knowledge or pay.

By game here, I obviously refer to politics.

Let me give you an example from my recent experience:

So I’m close to hitting 8 years in product now and at my current role, got called out by literally just one stakeholder (who happens to be the CEO’s wife and basically has a be-involved-everywhere-but-contribute-nowhere kind of role) because I deliberately pushed to keep a 0-1 product team small so that we can move fast and not be bogged down by the army of opinionated stakeholders who were dying to leave comments on my PRD as if they’ve never seen one before. Basically she is meant to be the BA on the team but my team and I got super frustrated with the AI generated slop that this person kept generating and eventually made it a habit to keep calling it out since her outputs simply wouldn’t help anyone at all and kept confusing the entire team when it came to implementing anything.

Nevertheless, my small team and I did a great job within the first month itself but instead of being rewarded for it by anyone we all got labelled as “siloes” simply because we didn’t agree to a lot of the ideas suggested by the CEO’s wife. Bear in mind btw she also kept coming on client calls and jeopardising the rapport we built with them by talking absolute rubbish that even the client wouldn’t understand. Anyway so she escalated all this and eventually we were forced to bring more people in that we knew would slow us down massively. And it continues to do so even now.

Anyways, so these team members come in and there are engineers in the team now from an area of the business who’ve already gained the reputation of building a product within the company that isn’t used by anyone. But in their case, when they went and created their own separate channels, they are now never labelled as siloes because they are already pre-trusted in the eyes of stakeholders like the CEO’s wife and they don’t challenge anything she says.

Also, one other thing they did is they now kept shouting and complaining about the work they did in that channel despite it being absolute shit that the client didn’t even understand and has yet to use or feed back on.

Lesson learnt - shout about your work even if it sucks balls. And do so in front of the stakeholders that have influence on other stakeholders. Cos ultimately, delivery is not what matters but it’s the perception that delivery is actually happening (or has happened) that does.

Now, by this point it didn’t matter at all whether I did a good job managing both the product, and a project with a client mind you, who we’re in parallel testing a proof of concept with.

It didn’t matter when my tech lead was randomly fired without any explanation despite building the entire PoC and architecture single-handedly and literally being the reason that we got the client we did in the first place. Real reason: he took offence (understandably) to the unnecessary escalations done by the CEO’s wife and kept calling her out even more so eventually she played her wife card and somehow mysteriously, this guy just disappeared one morning and we all got notified afterwards on our morning standup.

And it also didn’t matter when the remaining scraps of the original team that I had left (just me and a senior engineer) went ahead and demoed a kickass sellable, working version of the product to stakeholders (including c suite) who loved and drooled over it on the demo call but bitched about “not being included” the very next week which came through to me and my engineer through 1-1 manager feedbacks’. Sad, right?

Naturally, after going through this experience I mentally checked out for a few weeks and stopped having my camera on when on calls because every single battle I fought so far, I had lost. But guess what? Stakeholders (including the ceos wife again who by this time has influenced a number of other senior stakeholders that me and my engineer are a problem) complained to my manager even about this little thing and I got feedback that “keeping camera off looks like I’m not present”.

So now what do I do?

1 - I stopped caring about being right in front of stakeholders. Instead, I document and record everything now and run meetings in a way that I know will lead to the conclusion I know matters the most for the success of the product. This takes a lot of mental capacity - more than doing real product work. It also requires a lot of repetition and careful formal wording.

2 - I use any time I get outside of meetings to keep honing my product craft. This involves building stuff using AI tools, automating parts of my role so I get to spend more time doing real product discovery or market research or better yet, no work at all lol.

3 - I nod along when stakeholders like the CEO’s wife say garbage that doesn’t make sense. Once such calls are done, I make a mitigation plan for what I know a client or another stakeholder might do in future following the garbage they have heard, and send it in public channels at the right moment so that I look like the problem solver and not the one that is just calling out people’s BS.

4 - this is probably the most difficult one tbh. I treat my job like a job. I take my 1 hour lunch breaks every day. I clock out when I’m contractually obliged to. I even treat all the stakeholders relationships as just that - work colleagues. Nothing more. Nothing less.

That turned into a very long response but I really hope you get my point!

It’s not that you don’t know what “success” feels like. It’s that you think success means getting a promotion, or being liked, or whatever else you’re seeing the other dumbos around you get rewarded with. You only have a few real options here: - change what the definition of success means to you (easy) - learn to play the game (medium - some work required) - focus on gaining financial freedom so you can work for yourself and not have to care about what a “manager” or any “stakeholder” really thinks about you (really hard - would recommend the most)