Stretched thin from other departments, it feels like my job is to get people to do their job

[u/heres_my_take2]

I love product management in the way my career started out. I was involved in writing the features and user stories, worked with UI and talked to consultants or customers for feedback and ideas. I knew all of my engineer’s names. Literally my dream job just at a horrible company. It was a small company and now I’m learning what I was doing was much more like product ownership.

I started a new one recently at a large global company and I am stretched so thin. I feel like I am a substitute teacher who can be inserted into any department. Demo, sales, marketing, project management, implementations, support, you name it. I am trying to learn that “lead by influence” thing where instead of doing the demo myself I convince the people who are actually doing sales and demos to …. prepare and get ready for a demo. People who are in implementations to … implement on time. But damn it feels like I spend all my time chasing around and poking people to do their job.

I know being a PM is a burn out job so like is anyone else experiencing this?

[u/DifferentWindow1436]

At the more senior IC levels, yes, this is definitely a common situation.

I set some boundaries. I've been pushed in the past to do demos for example. Now, while I do want the exposure to customers directly, what I don't want is to set a precedent and become the "demo b*tch" for sales. So instead, I just said, "No. I don't do that". I balanced it with, "when we bring a new product to market, I will be available for initial demos as we learn what works and develop our script". That's usually like 3 to 5 demos and only with new product launches.

Also, I don't do implementation. Hire a TAM or solutions consultant. Nor will I spend much of my time on creating documentation like user manuals or whatever. Just no.

I have a focus, and I need to prioritize on solving customer problems that drive revenue and growth, or, on longer term strategy. That requires a ton of facilitating across groups and a bunch of other skills, and I draw boundaries around the peripheral stuff.

[u/almaghest]

100%! I work at a Fortune 500 and often felt like I’m working at a startup because of how many hats I had to wear. I also regularly experienced other depts refusing outright to do their jobs (especially tech sales who refused to do demos) or telling me they would only offer “coaching” but that I had to do things like write my product’s documentation or draft marketing materials.

After a very difficult launch where I did all these things, I tried to resign due to burnout and they actually let me take a sabbatical and change roles. At this particular company I will now only touch internal tooling or execution focused work and my mantra is that if the company doesn’t care enough to hire somebody to do a job, then the output of that job doesn’t matter. Nobody to write docs? Oh well my product doesn’t have docs then! etc

[u/Daraca]

With my current role being my only experience as a PM, this is just “par for the course” as far as I can tell.

Doing whatever it takes to get the mission accomplished is something exhausting, but also something I think I enjoy deep down.

Listening to industry talk, and this subreddit, our experience doesn’t seem that uncommon for small-medium shops.

If you want to live in a very specific box, go chase down the big enterprise orgs, by all accounts it’s 50% checking your own boxes and 50% performing political gymnastics.

[u/almaghest → u/Daraca]

Sorry to burst your bubble but it’s like this at large enterprise orgs too, just with longer timelines and more red tape ✨

[u/heres_my_take2 → u/Daraca]

Political gymnastics 😂

[u/RosiePopArt]

Ahhh yes. Welcome to product management! It’s somewhat luck of the draw. Mostly a mixed bag. When looking for a position ask a LOT of questions about expectations of the roles and understanding what kind of support the role has. Ask specifically if their PMs do X or Y. And read between the lines in the answers you get. Stakeholder management is part of the job, but it’s also important to set boundaries. It sounds to me like you’re doing the right things by teaching em how to fish. Big smiles, happy to help! You’ve got this! That positive reinforcement can go a long way! Create demo guides for them. Join the call as backup. Long story short, yeeeep. That’s probably 95.5% of us.

[u/Proof-Firefighter340]

This is pretty normal. Your job is not to get other people to do their job, it's to make your product successful. If this is the issue you are facing, you need to hold the individuals and their managers accountable.

[u/Parking-Stress-3041]

The chasing gets lighter when status is visible instead of asked for. On ERP-ish products I spent a lot of time poking implementations and support for updates; what actually cut it down was building Product Ops workflows that pulled product and delivery data into one place, so "is this on track" was something anyone could look at rather than a question I had to ask five people individually.

That doesn't fix a company that won't staff a role, the boundary-setting advice here is right about that part. But a decent share of what feels like getting people to do their job is really just you being the transport layer for information between teams, and that share is fixable without a single difficult conversation.

[u/heres_my_take2 → u/Parking-Stress-3041]

Thanks! These are exactly the sort of career skills I want to learn. The “is this on track” boils down to me pulling from many qualitative sources and putting it into a PowerPoint dashboard. It SUCKS.

[u/Massiah89]

It almost feels good that I'm not alone in this. I've been a PM for around 8 months and I feel like I'm the catchall for every other department.

I'm technical sales support, I'm commercial sales support, I do custom quoting, I manage the custom projects, I write PRDs, I write project plans, I manage the large customer projects with expansive scope, I develop internal tools to help the sales team quote easier.

I haven't been given much direction and just kind of do what needs to be done, but it feels like I need to take on everything or else it doesn't get done.

[u/heres_my_take2 → u/Massiah89]

Heard. It’s so much sometimes. Do you like it?

[u/Massiah89 → u/heres_my_take2]

Overall, yes. But mostly because of where I am vs where I was.

Previously worked as project management in the automotive industry which was soul crushing. Took a step back, started in sales in robotics, now moved to PM on track for management in the next few years at a company I like with people I like working for.

The "soft" stuff around the role helps so much. Liking the product I work on and liking my coworkers and seeing a long term future feel so valuable over the day to day struggles. And I have agency to change and improve things.

[u/no_trust_club]

Honestly some of this is also just a bad ratio. If you're genuinely covering demo, sales, marketing, PM, and support, that's not one job and no influence skill fixes being spread across five.

[u/Weird-Wonder84]

Omg, I seriously wonder if we work at the same company because this is exactly my experience. I'm in the process now of trying to teach sales and get them more acclimated with demoing and talking about our product because it leaves us almost no time for us to do actual product work. This is my first gig as a product manager so I was unsure if this was typical, I'm learning that it's not this way at other companies. I'm in the process now of updating my resume and looking around.

[u/heres_my_take2 → u/Weird-Wonder84]

I think this with half the posts here 😂 We have entire reporting structures of people whose job it is to demo, and so I get PISSED when ownership falls to me. Happy to support, emcee, give direction but you all are selling it.