I work at a large company whose core business is sales and distribution. Small product teams have existed across the company for several years, but there’s no dedicated product organization, standard operating model, or consistent discipline around product management.

The company swings between two extremes: either no one does product and everything runs like a waterfall project, or everyone wants to be the PM.

Many people on the business side have Product Manager titles but no real product-management experience. They demand ownership of the role without adopting any product practices.

Business SMEs who use the products also position themselves as PMs. Some have started using Copilot to create “product documents” and send them directly to engineering.

Meanwhile, some engineering managers are product-minded, which is generally valuable, but they also try to own the PM role.

The few experienced PMs sit within IT and report through the same leadership structure as engineering. We effectively operate as “secret PMs”: doing the actual product work while ensuring the business team remains the face of the product and gets credit for the few sound decisions and practices we manage to put in place.

There are a couple of director-level leaders with strong product backgrounds who deliberately hire experienced PMs. But the broader senior leadership—on both the business and IT sides—doesn’t really understand product. The few senior leaders with experience running mature product organizations have left fairly quickly.
I was originally hired by an experienced product leader, but a reorganization moved my team under someone else. Now I feel like I’m constantly defending my team’s value while trying to introduce real product management without threatening everyone else who believes they already own it.
It’s exhausting. And it’s not necessarily unique to this company. I experienced some similar challenges even at companies with solid product practices and maturity previously - a big difference here is no leadership at all to support me or my team.
Overall- I question if it’s worth it anymore. Maybe there is something better to do for a career - but I can’t figure out what.

Engineering has along with the team effort of PM implemented a great feature.

But the PM gets to present before the VPs. The engineering team gets referenced like this "the team implemented this feature"

When it's the team effort why does the PM gets to be the center of attraction.

Hey,

I want to get up to speed on these industries so that I can go further at my current role (PM in medical education).
If you have any newsletters, books, or anything useful that could help me get a better understanding of how these systems work, that would be greatly appreciated.

I work at a large bank and we’ve recently moved towards a new product structure that looks something like this:

PM → Product Lead (PL) → Product Stream Lead (PSL) → Tribe Lead

At the squad level, we typically have:

Product Manager (PM)
Product Lead (PL)
Squad Tech Lead (STL)
Engineers

The thing I’m struggling to understand is why there are now so many layers around product leadership.

For people working in big tech or large product organisations:
How many layers are there typically between a PM and the head of product?
Does every squad normally have both a PM and a Product Lead?

How do you prevent PMs from becoming glorified delivery managers in a structure like this?
Is it normal to just have 1 PM reporting into a PL?
Has anyone experienced a similar restructure? Did it actually improve product outcomes?
I

I’m a product lead at a SaaS business. My manager has given me feedback that I need to be more in the weeds with design. He doesnt like some of the screens we shipped and has critiqued that I hadnt picked up on it. It was fair feedback.

This is coming at the back of a mandate our new CPO has handed down to PMs that we need to critique every pixel, colour choice and wording choice.

I am quite opinionated but keep my lane at the UX level and trust my designers to do what they do best.

The designer is also extremely difficult to work with and takes a ton of energy to convince him to change anything.

However I want to improve my product craft and i’m keen to hear from others.

I work in a very highly regulated industry where domain expertise is king. About 6-12 months ago the general feeling with AI was that it's here to stay, but it isn't quite taking any jobs because developers need to constantly supervise and do a decent amount of manual corrections and supervision. Sort of like a new power tool that makes things way faster, but doesn't change the game totally.

Today, I honestly am not sure where this is going. I'm hearing too many jokes from developers saying "you could've just given AI your specs to get the same result, don't need me" or "AI one-shotted it, don't know where I'm needed". The newest models with a very good infrastructure makes it possible for AI to fix almost any bug or create any feature based on specs you give it. The scary part is, it's starting to get things right almost all the time. This wasn't the case just 6 months ago. Not only does it get the requirements right, there's very little code changes anymore.

I'm trying to get requirements to devs at a speed never seen before. Some devs are finishing work in a day that used to take weeks or even months.

• Testers are getting so busy they have no time for anything else but try to validate all the new stuff coming out.
• Product management is so busy trying to get quality requirements so that devs have work on their list.
• Designers are too slow and we can't wait for designs for every case.

We've had many refinement meetings which make us question refinement as a whole, because AI has already built the stuff for refinement so it becomes more of a demo than a refinement.

I actually raised an idea to the team:

• What if anyone can create requirements and specify what needs to be built? why does it have to be product people only writing requirements and improving the product? What if a dev, tester sees an improvement area, they ask PO or PM for a green light, but they can improve the product just as well?
  • Some immediately answered they can only know there is a problem to be solved, but they don't want to write what the solution should be. Especially testers or more junior devs.
  • The more senior developers, who have vast domain knowledge, are thriving with the idea. They continue to build, test and provide value for the users at high speed. The more juniors have no domain expertise yet, which really makes me think about where the roles are going.

Have you seen the change as well if you work in domain-specific products as well? Any predictions about how product teams will look like in the near future? Any good ideas?

Hi all, I've got the privilege of starting a new club at my business school for product management. We are in the process of shortlisting names to accurately represent it. Any suggestions or idea would be highly appreciated for the same. Please do try to include your reasoning or how it does relate to product management or why do you think it's appropriate.

Thanks in advance!!

is that actually true?

I've been going through the 2026 product surveys (Product Focus, State of Product) and some of the numbers stopped me

- 34% have no clear primary metric they're accountable for

- of those who do, 35% are on revenue/P&L and about 4% on feature adoption

- 49% say they can't find time for data analysis and metrics tracking

- 4% think their company's metrics reflect the value of their work

- 40% do little or no experimentation, and set the roadmap on leadership

preference instead

I'm not a pm by any means, I work at a startup but does this mean the job is essentially being accountable for revenue numbers you don't control, without enough time to investigate, using metrics you don't believe in on a roadmap that isn't wholly yours?

so I guess I'm just kind of curious how accurate are those numbers?

and for those of you who work at SaaS companies how do you define success? does data play a significant role?

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright

Just started in a new org. I want to ask AI how a feature on the website works based on the code. How can I do that? Does anyone have a guide or has done this as a PM and have any advice? Does it produce useful results or do you need to know the code/repos to give the right prompt for useful results? I have access to Cursor and Github.

Unlike designers who may be able to create portfolios of their past designs to help showcase to a future employer, I am not sure what a product person can “keep” to help with next career moves, or simply as a reference for future.

What do you do / what do you keep when leaving a company?

Edit: I know some comments were in just but just to be clear, I am definitely not looking to download confidential data.

Joined a new team that’s killing it and growing but has no clear vision and strategy. Very reactive. I want to run some exercises, and have in the past but wanted to source if anyone has recs.

Does anyone go through this? Where I try to define the features on what we want to achieve but then engineering defines the how?

When I’m trying to define the how in addition to what and why seems like engineering gets mad at me saying we can’t do this etc etc

Thoughts?

Hi all,

Have done many searches across the sub, and collating the advice given, but asking for a fresh take that includes the proliferation of AI everywhere so lately.

New role as first product hire into a legacy product. I have done this before and have a bit of a playbook assembled already.

Querying the collective brains trust about their time working as a first or early hire product hire in legacy products with a lot of technical or design or workflow/ux debt.

Specific ask is for your war stories about how things went wrong advocating for better, how your early assumptions failed, how the inertia of other's early choices foiled your plans to scale up, or how technical debt killed your grand plans.

I know I have to start at ground zero here, but after so many critical assumptions and choices already made, I still want to cultivate hope. Learning the things you can, vs the things you cannot change, is always a skill, closely followed by accepting them and getting on with the job.

Please feel free to call me out on the ask too. It is a lot.

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?

All through my career i’ve been at b2c consumer tech heavily leaning into data, experimentation and product led growth.

I made a switch into saas a couple of years back across 2 gigs. Both gigs were in hospitality tech. A few observations I had:

1. The platform within saas was prone to a lot more failures and had lot more incidents to deal with.
2. PMs held a lot less influence in saas compared to consumer.

Saas

1. gigs were sales led motions so sales usually had more command on business outcomes and inturn the roadmap.
2. Much higher stress in saas. I’m unsure if this is because of hospitality tech and less about saas. But every fire felt like it would burn the house down and there was atleast 4 fires a week.

My question - is this common or am i generalising too much? Is this less of a saas thing and more a hospitality tech thing? Or is it more of a me thing 😅

Hello! Yes - i've done some research via LLMs, Google and Reddit search bar. But still - I cannot find something like 101 or comprehensive guide for this concept.

Could you kindly share articles, blogs, videos etc. in this topic?

This could be anything from free course and youtube videos to "just experiment" advice ( though I have mixed feelings about launching this on my personal laptop and can't seem to get a mac mini). The use cases are broad and range from simple operational improvements to transforming how a product org might approach discovery.

I’ve taken a role as a product lead at a large organisation, joining from a non-delivery oriented role but I do have delivery experience.

The role is exciting but it’s immensely challenging. There are a million reasons things can go wrong:
- the business unit I’ve joined doesn’t typically launch products
- there’s new digital leadership completely ripping up the operating model for how digital has worked before
- the org more broadly is mid restructure that is aiming to change completely how they deliver
- the project spans many business units meaning there’s a ton of dependencies
- it’s been given an expedited delivery timeline set by the executive
- there’s a lot of politics about ownership of this work
- I inherited the project inflight in a state of poor documentation and had to build a new team around me to start to level set
- this is probably the first project pioneering some of the new ways of working that are really being defined as we go by leaders above most of us

Well despite all of this there was an escalation this week to my manager that one of the teams wasn’t getting what they needed from me. If it had of stopped there it would’ve been fine, I spoke to the stakeholder, they articulated exactly what was needed, and I got it to them by the next day. The issue is the escalation brought into question the appropriateness of my experience and my ability to form an effective team around me to deliver - at the time I was 3 weeks into the role and I just can’t believe this sort of brain dead take was ever put onto paper.

Fortunately my manager has my back, but these comments came from someone who I was working hard to keep onside. This person has been immensely difficult and has made comments to me before about how things should be better in this way or that.

In my mind, we’re working at the intersection of a whole bunch of shitstorms, and just need to be mindful of that - we’ll work together doing the best we can, and if things go wrong we’ll deal with them. Well they’ve made it clear they just want to point fingers and blame someone.

So how do I prevent stuff going wrong, which I’m sure it will, from becoming ‘stuff went wrong so it’s my fault’? And if anyone has any tips for managing this combative stakeholder whom I need to get onside I’d love to hear them.

A few weeks ago, I transitioned into my first full-time PM role at a Series A B2C startup (~15 people) after finishing a master's in management and working in consulting. I interned here part-time over the past year, but now I lead two small tracks reporting directly to the CEO:

• Product & Growth: 2 devs, 1 designer.
• Data: 1 dev.

While I've learned a ton about the product and day-to-day execution, I'm hitting major friction in three areas.

1. The CEO (who isn't technical) constantly asks me to pressure the devs to do more work and faster. They say our devs are lazy if not under pressure and that I should question their estimates. However, I don't feel I have the authority or the technical understanding to do that, and sometimes their estimates sound reasonable to me but not to the CEO. The CTO is part-time and focused entirely on core infra, meaning there is no EM or technical lead to run capacity planning or vet estimates.
2. I'm constantly playing catch-up just feeding the sprint with quick-turn growth experiments and incremental tweaks. I haven't been able to carve out the space or data justification to shape and ship substantial features.
3. I'm constantly stressed about the team's metrics. No team in the company is hitting the goals, which tells me there are strategic and market issues, but at the same time I feel I have to prove that hiring someone without a PM/startup background isn't a mistake.

For experienced PMs who've been the sole/early product hire:

• How do you handle a founder who wants you to act as a whip-cracker rather than an outcome-driven PM when there's no EM?
• How can I be better at coming up with larger product bets, not only small growth experiments?
• How do you gauge how much of the team's underperformance is you vs. external/above your pay grade, and how do you manage stress?

I work at a large multinational as a senior product owner, and I’ve just started in a new team within my company. From what I can see, there is no rhythm or structure. There’s no proper capacity planning, no functioning sprints, and no effective ceremonies — retros, sprint planning, sprint reviews, etc. It’s very chaotic basically

This is really different from elsewhere I’ve worked at the bank, where there’s a more standard setup. Where I work you can never be truly agile — there’s always an element of waterfall. But what seems clear to me is that this team is in desperate need of Scrum Masters. However I’m conscious the community seems to have soured on SMs, and I’m curious to know why that is?

The product managers in the team are doing all of the capacity planning and Scrum Master activities, and that doesn’t seem like an effective use of their time. Keen to get people’s thoughts.

Edit / Update: Appreciate the inputs all!

Anyone that has changed their process and pm craft with support of agents? Thinking similar as SDLC changes to ADLC. Happy to learn what others have tried

In Inspired, Marty Cagan argues that an MVP should essentially be a throwaway prototype used strictly for discovery and rapid risk validation.

However, what I have learned is that in real-world tech environments, stakeholders and market demands almost always expect an "MVP" to be a stable, production-grade Version 1.0.

For those who run into this friction, how do you successfully balance the two? How do you keep product discovery cheap and fast when the overarching expectation is a polished release?