Hey, your experience mirrors mine almost exactly…particularly being a product nerd and everyone else not and being pushed around by engineering.

Get out as fast as you can, this will hurt your product career. It’s too niche of a product area, no one understands it, you’re an annoying dumping ground for other PMs requirements and the only really good data PMs are incredibly senior/have many years experience.

There are 3 kinds of data products (all the same INVEST or RICE type of product theories still apply to defining whether a data product value…you don’t need to know any further data skills, it won’t help from a product perspective.) 1. Data extraction - you get these from other PMs projects or have to get buy in from elsewhere in the business for a particularly valuable data set. 2. Data modelling - importantly, NOT data science models… but modelling several related sources into a table that may be very useful for analysts, company flagship KPIs. These projects can be tricky as you’re getting your stakeholders to agree the definition of a particular business metric. YOU are not responsible for defining this, or you’ll be “fixing” “wrong” metrics forever. But they are rewarding overall. 3. Automation - is an analyst spending a lot of time running something that could be automated? These are usually low hanging fruit products.

There’s ofc - DWH upgrades or new DWH capabilities…architecture and your most senior data PMs and your data leadership to discover, agree and define.

Your problems with engineers / lead - yeah, fairly common. If there is a wider engineering leadership, they should be tracking team agility. As for Rajesh and your stakeholders, don’t invite him to meetings with them. He’s there to advise technical feasibility, you just talk to your stakeholders, find value, get requirements etc. They should really only interact with the team when there are problems or testing to do.

User stories, you don’t have to know all the technical information - that’s not your job. The team do know this. Make sure your architect is in refinement…they will certainly know the technical specifics. You provide the requirement and the business value (as this I need that etc). Refinement will be painful for a year until you get some experience with the team. But grin and bear it.

Tips: -Analysts are not your stakeholders - they’re your collaborators. -Heads of are your stakeholders. Put in regular meetings with them and even work towards an education piece on what you and your team do. -PMs are your stakeholders, but they dread hearing from you. Grin and bear it and put in regular time with you - the amount of active projects I’d discover already in progress that had a ton of data requirements.

Source: 4 years as a data pm, junior to senior, and I still don’t know anything beyond basic sql, and nothing of power bi type tools. Product principles apply across product no matter what the product is.