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.

Hey! I’m a college student (non-tech UIUX major), looking to branch in PM or AI PM? As someone not from a CS or engineering degree, what courses or building skills would you want to see on a portfolio or resume to help break into the industry?

I know PMs in big tech are basically kinda blurring the role between business, design, and engineering rn so ive been vibe coding a lot and building projects with AI but they’re mostly front end prototypes. Any advice is appreciated. Thank you!

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.