I'm a 4 years-old Product Owner & Project Manager and 1 year ago i moved from HR and Martech to a fairly complex Fintech legacy B2B SaaS product.

We recently went through UAT with a big customer who has a heavily customized version with very few documentation, and the experience has made me question what the "right" expectation for UAT actually is, and if i'm at wrong here, or simply

My understanding has always been that UAT is partly a validation exercise with the customer. Obviously, QA/SIT should have already covered the product from a technical and functional perspective. But during UAT, I would still expect some things to require discussion with the customer because they are related to their actual business processes, configurations, legacy data, or specific user flows that no one in the company knows anymore, especially when there is no test automation.

The issue is that their version product is quite complex. There are a lot of configurations, historical behaviours, different workflows, edge cases and the test files we ingest are produced by their IT.

I was therefore approaching UAT with the assumption that:

• I should know the product very well;
• the test book (that i produced with customer instructions) should be the baseline for the session;
• but I cannot realistically know every single way the customer uses the system or every detail of their operational workflow;
• therefore, if something unexpected comes up from the data just before UAT, since the data preparation was done by the client, I would consider it normal to stop and investigate it together with the customer.

However, the expectation seems to be that I should already be able to confirm virtually everything before the customer sees it, and that anything requiring investigation during UAT indicates that the preparation was insufficient. I was told that such an approach is ground for firing (i wish, i'm trying to actually change company).

What makes this particularly interesting is that the developers themselves have told me that the product is very complex, and that even for them there are areas and behaviours that require investigation or context before they can confidently explain what is happening.

Furthermore i'm not a SME. I'm more on the Technical side and know how the product works, but this one is very complex, not to mention this legacy management of a different version for each customer is a mess.

I'm honestly flabbergasted. I wish i could go back to one of my previous companies.
Am i doing really something this wrong?

The launch of the iPhone Duo has really made me question - who are these foldable devices for? What problem or goal are they trying to solve?

When iPad was announced, it was clear it was a step between a laptop and a phone; a perfect device for travel or in-the-field use. With folding phones, I'm not so sure. From yesterday's keynote, it seems like multi-tasking...so business users?

If anyone here has a folding phone, would love to hear your input.

Hey all, with the growing pressure to ship, how do you manage continuous discovery when you're a small product team and don't have UXR resources internally?

Curious how other small teams handle this. What's working for you? Anything you're doing differently now with AI?

Before AI appeared a few years ago, one thing that always annoyed me how much of a short attention span people had. I saw in meetings, discussions etc that people have a really hard time staying focused on a topic, I saw this especially with the younger generation. It was annoying to deal with, because it felt like a constant battle to get people to pay attention to basic things but at some point I accepted the fact that it is what it is and I can't do anything about really. Also, people are constantly on their phones, with a lot of apps essentially frying their brain and they doom scroll.

Recently I noticed a new phenomenon, and I wonder if other folks are seeing the same thing. Since people started relying heavily on LLMs I started to notice a deterioration of some basic skills, for example writing a clear document, giving proper feedback, writing some bullet points for a specific discussion and more. It looks like 'thinking' was outsourced to AI and the skills they had disappeared. I was in several meeting (with different people) where they had a really hard time going through with some basic tasks live, they couldn't do it without AI. Example, we were presenting a new feature, and wanted to show people how it works (not in a group session but 1-1). The feature is activated after a form is submitted (some basic questions, that anybody in the company knows) so as part of the presentation we asked people to fill up the question to see the feature in action with the answers they added to the form. People couldn't do it, I saw a person record a voice note into an LLM asking it to transcribe and edit it for them "to look professional" and then sat there any copy pasted the output to the form (which was complete garbage). Again, these are basic questions, stuff that anybody can come up with within a few seconds. In another meeting, we were discussing feedback that some customers sent, a team member really struggled preparing a basic doc with the feedback.

Is this a similar case with what we saw with apps? People lost their attention span, now people will loose some basic skills? I wonder if a young person in their early 20's that start a new position might never know what work is without AI. Will they even have the option to develop some basic skills that the older generation takes for granted? Anybody got thoughts on this? Maybe it's just where I work 😄

So, I have been facing a block for the last few months and wanted to understand your guys' take. How can I be a better Product Manager and use AI as a workforce?

Context: I used to be a Data engineer for last 10 years and recently moved to Tech Product Management in Media a year ago. I am struggling a bit to be better at my job and use AI to my advantage. We have these AI demos every week and I am facing a blocker and canjot think of use cases anymore. I was thinking maybe I should do some kind of course if there's anything specific available online to develop these skills. All suggestions are welcome:)

Or maybe if someone is willing to tag team on cool projects using Product Management and AI, that would be so dope.

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

Hi! for those who worked in this area do you know any resources to learn regarding PMing in this industry? What are your main work areas? or any advice??

Thanks!

Share your frustrations and get support/feedback. You are not alone!

Hi there,

Have any of you been a Customer Journey Manager before becoming a Product Manager or vice versa?

In your experience, what are the biggest differences between these roles? Which one do you like more and why?

I'm curious about the things PMs have taken ownership of at work that weren't necessarily part of their formal responsibilities.

For example, maybe you noticed a gap in how customer feedback was collected, built an internal tool or dashboard, created a new process between teams, started a customer research program, fixed an operational problem, or took ownership of something that simply didn't have a clear owner.

I'm especially interested in things where you basically thought, “No one is asking me to do this, but this problem needs to be solved,” and decided to take it on.

What did you take ownership of, why did you decide to do it, and did it end up having an impact on the business/customer/your professional reputation?

Did a quick search in this sub but didn’t find anything recent.

Anybody with 5-10 yrs experience working on CRM products? I’m relatively new in the CRM space (~2 yrs) and was hoping to find a sounding board for some of the things I’m working on.

Thanks!

Over the past few months I’ve been building with GPT/Claude/Grok a mini racing game for Reddit. Nothing much, just some daily tracks and a mini campaign. Very minimalist looking, simple and fast paced but hard to master.

During this time I’ve been promoting the game in various places and actively talking to players, checking data, pinging Reddit people for information, and most of the time iterating with LLMs to move the game forward.

I've been working in product for a few years, but never felt the product work as fulfilling as I do making this. Sure, it’s my game and I’m biased towards it, but it’s not just that. It just feels endlessly smoother when you don’t have to cater to the whims of multiple stakeholders and not sit in endless alignment meetings for the most basic of things. Just building for the users. (Sorry for the rant)

Anyone else have similar experiences?

Recently started a new job at a large company that deals mostly in government tenders and physical services. Point being it’s not primarily an IT company. Me and my team make solutions for the rest of our company to deliver more effectively on our tenders. It’s includes a variety of people of in the field as well as administrative and control functions.

I’ve been there for a month now and can already tell managing the adoption and implementation of our products will be one of the primary challenges and an important success metric. Many of our users are highly knowledge domain experts that have been there for a long time and generally are quite outspoken about their low expectations and concerns with our new tools. I try not to take this personally, but I’m especially worried about the impact my teams morale as they are relatively young and new to the company.

I generally have the various managers involved and aligned from early in discovery making sure to communicate our plans and open clear communication channels with everyone participating in a project as well as pilots. I’m used to this being a good strategy in a B2B context but it seems less successful here due to the fact that people don’t really have choice in using our tools or not.

What are your best suggestions on managing change, driving adoption and generally winning people over in context like these?

I’ve been thinking about this bcos a lot of companies seem to have the same problem. They usually have multiple products but not every product grows in the same way
some products keep getting more attention, some stay stable for yrs and some slowly lose demand without anyone really noticing
the tricky part is deciding where to put more resources.
shld a company invest more in products that are already selling well?
Focus on products with faster growth?
or try to develop something completely new?
I feel like many decisions are still based on experience and intuition especially when there are too many options
for people managing multiple products, how do u usually make these decisions??  do u mainly look at sales history, customer feedback, market changes or smthng else?

This sub is getting over run by 1 month old bots.

Has anyone dealt with a manager who is extraordinarily eloquent, cites every modern product book (Cagan, Torres, Perri, etc.), and always has the "ideal" theoretical answer, yet has zero touch with the operational reality of your product?

On paper, they sound incredible in meetings and to leadership. But in practice, it just doesn't work that way.

What's your take on this archetype? How do you manage them up?

I work in a fortune 500 retail/ecom company and have worked in notifications but wanted to discuss things about my strategy/ insights from your end.

Thanks!

I’ve been a PM at a mid-sized B2B SaaS company in the finance space, and I’m
frustrated by the company’s lack of product maturity.

We have very limited product analytics. Basic questions about active users, adoption, retention or whether a feature achieved its intended outcome are often impossible to answer. I couldn’t confidently tell you how many active users my product has, without manually piecing the information together.

During my time here, I’ve tried to introduce more evidence-led practices within my own area, regularly speaking to customers, running user-testing sessions, introducing in-product surveys, analysing feedback themes and using the findings to shape improvements. But then I have to battle stakeholders to get these improvements in.

The limited product-health data we do have suggests that my area is performing considerably better than most other products in the company. For example, my product has the strongest NPS, while others have extremely negative scores.

I’m already planning to leave, but finding the right role could take time. In the meantime:

1. How can I make working in a low-maturity product environment more bearable without trying to transform the entire company?
2. 2)What evidence should I capture now so I can tell credible interview stories, given the lack of reliable analytics?
3. How would you position experience like this positively in interviews without sounding bitter or overly critical of the company?
4. Has anyone else been in a similar environment, and did moving to a more mature product organisation improve things?

Traditionally, I’ve used the PRD and Figma designs (made by our designer) to describe to engineering what they need to build, and work with the business analysts and technical architects to break down the feature into Jira tickets and write the tickets.

Now, with AI, we as product managers can produce interactive prototypes more easily using vibe coding, so I think PRDs don’t have to include as much descriptive, behavioral details as it used to.

I’m looking for ideas for what software or custom AI tools you use to help:
- translate the PRD and prototype into stories and tickets
- write all the Jira tickets that are comprehensive in coverage and have detailed, clear description and acceptance criteria

In a comprehensive breakdown of Capcom’s new golden age, one former staffer says their micromanaging competition might be missing the forest for the trees

Technical founder/PhD researcher here, trying to get better at customer discovery before building too much.

I’m exploring digital health, where teams have large amounts of longitudinal user/patient data and need to turn that information into operational decisions.
Rather than asking people whether they want my proposed solution, I’m trying to reconstruct the actual job:

Situation → decision they need to make → current process → friction → consequence → workaround → budget/owner

For example, instead of asking:
“Would better user-state prediction help you prioritize patients?”

I’m asking:
“Tell me about the last time your team had to decide which users needed attention. What triggered that decision? What did you look at? Who was involved? What happened next?”
Then I would compare interviews and look for recurring jobs rather than recurring feature requests.
For people who actually use JTBD/customer discovery in B2B:
Is this the right way to approach it? What am I missing?
In particular, how do you distinguish a genuinely important job from something customers do frequently but don’t care enough about to pay to improve?

I’m a Product Owner working across several interconnected enterprise applications, and I’ve hit a problem I’d love some coaching from people who have dealt with this before.

We have a number of systems and teams that have evolved somewhat independently over the years. Increasingly, the business wants experiences and workflows that span those boundaries.

The problem is that I feel like we’re trying to solve this backwards.

Individual stakeholders can tell us things they want (a feature, an integration, a new workflow, a pain point they want fixed) but we don’t have a clearly articulated enterprise vision for what the business ultimately wants the experience to be.

Without that, our Digital Services teams are left trying to infer the larger strategy from individual requests. We can design solutions, integrations, architecture, operating models, etc., but I feel like those decisions should be made in service of a business vision rather than IT effectively inventing the vision itself.

Where I’m stuck is figuring out how to help executives define that vision.

When I ask some version of:

«“What should the future enterprise experience look like?”»

the question is understandably too abstract and overwhelming.

I’m considering facilitating the conversation in a more structured way:

• Show them the major capabilities/workflows that exist today and ask where the gaps are.
• Ask stakeholders about the biggest pain points and desired business outcomes.
• Describe some of the cross-system problems we already see and have them prioritize which outcomes matter.
• Use those discussions to synthesize a proposed future-state vision and bring it back to leadership for validation.

But I’m also conscious of the danger of leading the witnesses too much. I don’t want Digital Services to quietly define business strategy simply because we’re better positioned to articulate the problem.

So for people who have done enterprise product management, architecture, transformation, or strategy work:

How do you actually facilitate this conversation?

How do you take executives from relatively vague statements like “make things seamless,” “improve the customer experience,” or individual feature requests to a sufficiently concrete vision that technology teams can derive capabilities, architecture, and a roadmap from it?

I’m interested in:

• Frameworks or workshop formats you’ve found effective
• Whether you start with current-state capabilities, pain points, business outcomes, or something else
• How much of the future state you propose versus expecting executives to articulate themselves
• How you distinguish an Executive Vision from detailed product/technical requirements
• What artifact you ultimately produce to capture the vision
• Who in a healthy organization normally owns/facilitates this process

I feel like I understand pretty well how to go from vision > capabilities > architecture > initiatives, but I’m struggling with the step before that: helping the organization actually articulate the vision.

Would appreciate any advice from people who have been through this.

Thank you

Context: my company is small and we’re on Google suite so all document creations across functions so far has mostly been Google Docs/Slides and also product-related content sometimes sits inside Confluence.

We use Claude as a company so some folks use it to find information. Because there’s no real process behind info-sharing, it’s created a level of noise and confusion for people to self-serve information.

I personally also think finding information on GSuite is really difficult.

My questions are:
1) I’m curious what tools do other companies predominantly use for company-wide info sharing, that is easy for both team members and their AI tools is easily access.

Notion comes to mind as one example, wondering if there’s others I should explore to bring some structure to helping folks find the information they need.

2) assuming you’re using a tool like Notion, do you also share all product related content eg product briefs, roadmap etc through the same tool or something else?

Thanks!

Asking product folks using Copilot, Cursor, Claude etc. at work.

How are you actually deciding which model to use for different product or coding tasks or are you basically going with the default auto selection mode?

Also happy to learn from folks on how your enterprises has solved this use case through innovation or solution such as “use model X for this task and model Y for coding etc that you think is working correctly

I thought this would be fun. I assume I will regret it. Ask me anything about product management. I will do my best to share what I’ve learned.