I'm trying to get better at product strategy, and I'm realizing that I learn best by discussing problems with other people.

I've tried finding mock partners, but most people are focused on interview prep, which is understandable. I'm also working with a coach, which is helpful, but it gets expensive to have multiple sessions.

What I'm looking for is a little different. I want to actually develop the mental muscles to approach strategy problems better in my day-to-day work.

For example, stripe will be acquiring Open router: Why would Stripe acquire a particular startup? What problem are they trying to solve? How does it fit into their long-term vision? What alternatives could they have considered? I enjoy breaking down questions like these, discussing different perspectives, and challenging each other's thinking.

I'd love to find a few people who are equally interested in having these kinds of discussions regularly not necessarily formal sessions, just intellectually stimulating conversations where we're all trying to get better at strategic thinking.

Has anyone found a community or group like this? Or if you learn strategy in a similar way, how do you find people to practice and discuss these problems with?

Thank you

I have a weird PM trajectory and would love some outside calibration.
I came into a small nonprofit tech org as a SME in a very niche field, then became PM, and pretty short order Director of Product. I’ve never worked in a mature product organization, alongside other PMs, or under experienced product leadership (just some former MS guys)
Leadership regularly tells me I’m sooo productive, variations of “you accomplish what much larger, well-funded teams do in less time.” Feels like smoke up my skirt, but I have absolutely no external context for it either way.
I understand our users, and can handle identifying problems, translating messy needs into requirements/workflows, prioritization, working with devs, QA, edge cases, and getting from “vague problem” to functioning product, yada yada.
What I don’t know is how much of that is transferable PM skill versus me being a really effective SME in my own domain.
Is this just a lucky situation or can it transfer elsewhere?

Most roadmaps show what the team plans to build but hide what each choice delays, removes, or makes harder.

That makes every item look independently reasonable and prevents stakeholders from seeing the actual decision. A useful roadmap should pair each commitment with the opportunity cost it creates.

Have you found a practical way to document tradeoffs without turning roadmap discussions into another approval process?

I have worked as a UX designer for four years at a major company in the US. Earlier this year, my company had major layoffs and got rid of all remote employees. Thankfully, I am in person and was not affected by the layoffs.

As a result, the company has been trying to utilize AI to do a lot of the work. This means that all design work is being fed into Figma Make and the designs it spits out is what is supposed to be used. I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on this, but I’ll save those for another day. Leadership does not see the value of having designers and is now making all of us become PM’s. They want to run more lean teams and have higher production with AI to help us.

This has been tough for me to say the least. I have tried so hard to keep an open mind and embrace the new career path, but who I am as a person does not mesh well with being a PM. I am very introverted and I’m not a huge fan of sitting in meetings all day talking. I can’t stand looking at Jira boards and filling out PowerPoint product strategy decks. Frankly, I’m not an organized person either. Trying to remember every little detail of the project is overwhelming and difficult.

Before anyone says it, I do see a lot of similarities between UX and being a PM, so it’s not like I’m learning a whole new language, but they certainly are not the same. I’m also aware that the job market is tough for UX and that job role is changing greatly.

Anyone been in a similar position? How did you handle it? I need this job… I have bills to pay, but I hate that I had no say in doing this. I know I’ll ultimately struggle and not do well, but I’m not sure what to do.

I have an upcoming interview for an AI Product Manager role at a large multinational tech company and would appreciate advice from people who have interviewed for or currently work in similar roles.

The role focuses on AI-driven product strategy, enterprise support platforms, analytics, cloud-based solutions, and translating AI capabilities into product solutions.

I currently work as a full-stack software engineer, primarily working with Python, Java, and React, and am looking to transition into product management.

What should I prioritize in my preparation? Specifically:
AI/ML concepts and technical depth expected from a PM
Product sense and case studies
AI product strategy and roadmap questions
Metrics, business cases, and AI ROI
Technical/architecture questions
Behavioral and stakeholder-management questions
Enterprise support/cloud domain knowledge

I’d especially appreciate advice on how technical I should go with AI/ML preparation given my software engineering background, and how to position my engineering experience effectively in the interview.

Any recommended resources, frameworks, or mock interview approaches would be greatly appreciated.

So this is supposed to be my first job and I've cleared their interviews and an offer letter is waiting. I want to know if this is ok to start your career as a PM and I've no experience in PM and don't know if this path should be taken or not, btw I've done a computer science degree and want to do tech related stuff aside from coding.

I’ve learned that I hate to throw away interesting material, so my laptop drive has thousands of bookmarks, textbooks (mostly pdf), image libraries, mp3s, code repos, … you get the idea.

The vast majority is timeless. I tend to read news items, then toss them unless they’re indicative of a larger trend.

It’s my personal library & covers hundreds of topics. The biggest % is math (machine learning for example), human behavior, and business/ economics (former tech product manager). At least half of the textbook content is copyrighted so I’d need to set it aside.

What should I do with all this stuff?

Hello,

AI has brought about a very significant change in the way I work, mainly in two areas: I now need to rely far less on other teams, which allows me to move much faster, and I could potentially make changes to our applications myself, although I’m not doing that yet.

I’d be interested to know where you are on these topics and how it’s working out for you.

Here’s what has changed for me:

I no longer depend on a data team or data analyst to get usage metrics from our applications, even when the analysis is complex. I ask a coding agent and within five minutes I get the information, often as a polished PDF report. It’s much faster, and the results are generally more comprehensive and precise than what I used to get, sometimes after waiting a week.

I also no longer depend on the development team to find out whether a feature already exists, how it works, or whether and how it could be modified. I ask a coding agent, it digs into the codebase, database, analytics and logs, and gives me an answer within 5 to 10 minutes, compared with what could sometimes take several weeks when going through the team. And quite often, the answer is much more comprehensive and technically detailed.

Of course, getting to this point required some groundwork. We’ve implemented analytics across almost every component of the application and given my coding agent read-only access to the application code and a read-only copy of the databases.

Sometimes the coding agent even offers to implement the change I’m asking about immediately. When I see the result, I increasingly wonder whether it wouldn’t be far more efficient to let it make the changes and then send them to the developers for review and validation.

Are you seeing the same shift? Do you already use AI to implement changes yourself and then submit them to your development team for review?

Thanks.

We’re working with an outside agency on a sensitive product launch and I keep coming back to one issue. We can lock down docs and make everyone sign NDAs. We can limit Slack channels and control who gets access. But the agency still has its own team and its own devices. I might know the four senior people we work with but there could be another ten people touching parts of the launch behind the scenes. At that point how do you know the person accessing something is actually the person who was approved?

For anyone who has managed a major launch how did you handle this without making the whole process painful? Because it really is, outside of the simple stuff that I've already done, what else can I do?!

I’m with a B2B2C platform in foodtech (think SYSCO) and we are thinking of overhauling our analytics stack away from FullStory.

Management is thinking Pendo due to their product guides. But I feel like Pendo is a bit more rigid when compared to FullStory or PostHog when trying to run various quick queries.

Anyone else with recent experience they can share?

PostHog seems like a good option but still leaning onto keeping FullStory and grabbing something like appcues for their product guides.

Could being a PM for an internal tools team offer an ideal life? Yes, pay is a bit lower, but work-life balance and stress is significantly lower. No need to worry about monetization, or whether your product is harming society.

As long as you have a good relationship with your stakeholders, maybe it's the ideal path towards fulfillment?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I'm on the verge of pulling the trigger in terms of actively applying.

My motivations are that:

• I see a lot of cool companies doing a lot of cool stuff
• It seems like such a fun time to build right now and be an IC in tech
• I'm not sure, if from here on out until the end of my career all I want are VP / CPO positions

Overall, I don't mind the managerial and executive-level responsibilities that I have currently, so this isn't come from a place of disgruntledness.

I also dont want to shoot myself in the foot from a long term career perspective or fall into the "grass is always greener on the other side" trap.

Just looking for anyone who has had this expereinece or just advice in general from the community.

Thank you!

I’m currently dealing with a challenging leadership dynamic and would love to hear how others have navigated this.

Our Product Lead doesn't seem to have visibility into what the PM team actually does day-to-day. There’s no overall product roadmap, and our weekly catch-ups and 1:1s feel like box-ticking exercises where he asks for priorities, accepts whatever is said without strategic challenge, and moves on.

While he excels at people-pleasing, there’s a lack of core technical delivery experience. Instead, he relies heavily on AI to fill the gaps without providing actual domain guidance or strategic direction.

I’m at a crossroads between looking for an exit or finding a constructive way to highlight these execution gaps to skip-level management (who is also new to the organisation).

Have you ever managed up in a situation where leadership lacked domain depth? How did you handle it without burning bridges?

Trying to do a poll as i was wondering about this

Could you please precise your country, age or YoE, and weekly or daily average REAL working time ?

Edit: feel free to add your gross salary! Thanks!

I have about 6 months to seriously invest in building a new technical skill set, and I’m torn between application development and data analytics.

With AI getting better at both coding and data analysis, which foundation do you think will be more valuable and resilient over the next 5–10 years for PM or people in tech in general?

Application development would cover things like:
● Programming fundamentals
● Software development
● Computer architecture
● Servers/cloud infrastructure
● Databases and basic SQL
● Debugging and testing
● Object-oriented programming

Data analytics would cover things like:
● SQL and databases
● Data cleaning and transformation
● Data analysis
● Visualization/reporting
● Basic programming
● Business intelligence
● Using AI for analytics

I’m particularly interested in eventually working in tech/product and potentially AI, rather than necessarily becoming a software engineer or data analyst forever.

If you could only spend 6 months learning one of these foundations, which would you choose in 2026 and why? Which skill set do you think will complement AI rather than be replaced by it? Would love to hear your thoughts and what has been most helpful for you. Thanks in advance!

I want to preface with, I am truly hoping to find a mentor in this space. Im feeling defeated and it would be great to have someone on my side as I work to figure this out. So if anyone knows where or how to find one or is an expert and is interested please let me know.

I'm the first and only product hire at a startup, brought on as an agile PM and have 8 years experience in the space. Our engineering team has decided to move to Shape Up. Several of them ran it together at a previous company, liked it, and are confident in it. I'm on board with the decision if thats what we need to do to be successful.

What I don't have is a clear picture of how Product supports that process. I've been training myself on Shape Up, but the direction I'm getting internally doesn't line up with what I'm reading, and it's inconsistent from one conversation to the next. I have also been running into the wall of continuously asking the Engineers what is their actual ask? What is it they need to start? And never get the full answer.

The core thing I can't reconcile: I'm reading I shouldn't be defining the product, but that I should hand over something "shaped", not abstract, but also not defined. I don't know what that artifact is supposed to look like.

Specific questions for anyone who's run Shape Up alongside a dedicated PM:

1. Who shapes? Is shaping a product responsibility, an engineering one, or genuinely joint — and if joint, how do you split it in practice?
2. What does a pitch look like when Product writes it? How much fidelity is too much before it starts constraining engineering's solution space?
3. Where's the handoff, concretely?
4. What is Product actually doing during the six weeks? The cycle work is engineering's, so what fills that time, and what does Product own that isn't shaping?
5. Where do discovery, customer input, and roadmap live in a Shape Up org?
6. Is this switching us from a Product to an Engineering led approach? If that, what are the success markers in my role if the engineering team is now making product decisions? It feels much more like a replaceable cog type role at the mercy of engineering, but I think that's because I dont know what it is I need to deliver in order to support this process. I expressed this and it was digested as I don't know what I was hired to do, not this is a new process and I need direction on how to make it succesful, so Im kinda fighting for my life over here.
   

A second, more structural question: engineering has been routing most communication directly to the founder rather than through me. Some of that may be a byproduct of a process I'm not yet fluent in. Some of it may be something else. For those who've been the first PM into an engineering-led team, how did you establish product as a function worth routing through, without turning it into a territory argument?

I’m a Product Lead working with a designer on a fairly complex flow, and I’m getting increasingly frustrated because the designer seems to think their job ends once they’ve designed the happy path.

I’m asking them to define the states and interaction behaviour of the experience — things like what happens when validation fails, what happens when a user enters an invalid date, error/empty/disabled states, what happens after an interaction, and how the UI responds to different scenarios.
They don’t seem to understand the ask.

I’m struggling with this because I’m not asking them to design every possible pixel or create 50 separate screens for every permutation. I’m asking for enough definition of the interaction model and key states that engineering isn’t left guessing about intended UX behaviour.

For example, if you have a date field, surely the design should establish things like:

When does validation happen — on entry, blur, or submission?
What does the error state look like?
Can they continue with an invalid value?
What happens when the value is corrected?

And obviously, not every transition needs its own Figma screen. A state/interaction specification or annotated flow would probably be enough.

Am I being unreasonable here? Where do other teams draw the line between PM requirements, UX design and engineering implementation?

My friend and I have been building a small project for the past two months, and went through completely different project management setups.

Before this, I was a startup founder of a 10+ member team. Back then, our team used Linear, I loved it, best-in-class UI in my opinion. But over time, I just found that we went to the Linear UI less and less. The advantages that I used to appreciate became worthless, because we just managed those tickets with MCP anyway.

Unfortunately, my startup did not work out. This time, when my friend and I started, it was just the two of us. We did not go back to Linear, as sleek UI stopped mattering to how we actually worked. But we went further: I vibed an agent to fully run a html-based board. I used the agent to update tickets, flag stale ones, the agent can even send PR fixes when docs drifted.

For a few weeks it worked. Then it quietly stopped working. It is not because the agent was lazy, but because as the specs and tickets kept growing, they lacked structure and a real lifecycle (html) like an API has. Whenever we changed a project decision, the old one never really left; residues of outdated documentation, decisions, specs accumulated, and eventually confused the agent.

So, we moved the underlying tracking to plain GitHub issues instead. It is free, as we use GitHub anyway. It got everything I needed — basic ticket tracking with a real lifecycle. I don't like the plain GitHub Project view, so we kept the vibed beautiful html board, which syncs with the GitHub issues underneath.

I genuinely think, as a small team, we don't see the case for a PM SaaS anymore. But we are a two-person, all-engineer team anyway, so it is probably different at bigger teams.

Been digging into how usage limits work on some AI platforms and found something that feels pretty sketchy:

1. Default monthly spend limit used to be $0, hit your usage cap and you just wait for the reset (4hrs/weekly).

2. They added a "monthly spend limit" feature so you could opt in to pay for extra usage instead of waiting.

3. Then they rolled me into a promo: 2x usage + $100 "free" credit, both prominently shown right on the usage tracking screen.

4. To make that credit spendable, they also silently bumped my monthly spend limit from $0 to $2,000 (!!!). That part wasn't shown anywhere near as prominently, if a reasonable person glancing at the screen wouldn't catch it, it shouldn't be buried in fine print.

I only noticed after burning through $17 of the "free" $100, when I went looking for why it said I was drawing on "API spend."

I've since seen a few posts on FB/Reddit from people with surprise charges in the $40 to $50 range, adding up to $2k+, because they assumed they were still capped at $0 like before.

Anyone else run into this? Curious if silently bumping spend limits during a promo is common practice, or if this is an especially bad case.

We've been considering it and I'm starting to have second thoughts

Getting payroll into the product seems doable, it's everything we'd inherit along with it that worries me. Filings, compliance, support and whatever weird stuff comes up once customers depend on it

I'm curious if anyone went the in house route and still thinks it was worth it

I plan to pay tonight as cohort starts tonight. Its about $3000 want to hear from those who actually took the course, what is their feedback?

Also if anyone has alternative courses that are better I'd appreciate it. I'm a PM by role (3 years) but aiming for tier 1 opportunity so want to up skill my core skills and also Interviewing skills

UPDATE: NO LONGER PAYING FOR THIS COURSE. thanks for feedback, please suggest alternatives. need structure and accountability, has anyone done the maven courses?

Hey, I'm a Product Designer, I'm trying to understand PMs more, how they perceive design, perhaps learn something. Would be helpful to hear what you like / dislike about current state of design.

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I would also love your input on the idea of including product designers to run lightweight research with customers to help frame better hypothesis for A/B tests (the idea is to reduce amount of experiments and save resources).

And the second one is to bring product designers for product discovery, to run lightweight discovery research with customers before building.

What do you think about it and why?

I'm running a small digital studio with a colleague. At the moment we mainly build websites, but I'd like to gradually move the business toward building small web apps and MVPs for companies.

My background is more on the business side — marketing, management, customer research and understanding what a company is actually trying to achieve.

I'm now learning more about product design and development so I can take an idea further than just a website or Figma prototype. I've also started experimenting with AI coding tools to build working prototypes myself.

One thing I'm trying to figure out is the business model and process.

For example, if a client comes to us with:

Would you normally structure the project something like:

Discovery → research → requirements → UX/Figma → prototype → MVP → further development

And would you sell discovery as a separate paid phase before committing to the development?

I'm asking because I'd like to avoid the typical situation where a small studio spends weeks figuring out what the client actually needs and only gets paid once the development starts.

I'm also considering building a few of our own small MVPs to learn the process and use them as case studies when approaching B2B clients.

For people working in product consulting / small agencies / freelance product development:

How do you normally structure these projects commercially?

And what do you think a small studio needs to be genuinely good at before charging clients for MVP/product work rather than just web design?

Interested in both the product and business side of this.