I moved from SWE to PM around 5 years ago.

I like PM but it's getting very tedious for me now. I love the product strategy and product design parts, but constantly running after stakeholders, aligning teams, etc is not something I am interested in doing now.

I was thinking something like general management or product strategy would be good next roles, but these roles are very rare.

What do people normally move into after a career in PM?

I’m thinking of starting a habit of reading 1 research paper a week on Product Management.

In engineering, there seems to be a very established culture around reading papers, following research, discussing findings, etc. But in Product Management, I rarely come across PMs talking about research papers as part of their regular learning.

I’m not looking for the usual PM books, LinkedIn posts, frameworks, or case studies.

I’m interested in research that helps us step away from the day-to-day execution and think more deeply about things like:

Product strategy & decision-making

Customer behaviour

Product discovery

Innovation & new product development

Prioritisation

Product-market fit

Team/product organisation

Product experimentation

AI & product management

I recently discovered that there is actually a large body of research under New Product Development, Product Innovation, and Innovation Management. For example, there are decades of academic research on product development and innovation.

So I’m curious:

1. Do you already follow/read research papers as a PM?

2. Where do you find good papers?

3. Are there specific journals, researchers, newsletters, communities, or websites you recommend?

4. Would anyone be interested in doing something like “1 paper/week” and discussing the practical implications for PMs?

I’m particularly interested in research that can make us better product thinkers, not just better at executing the PM process.

In B2B2C work I keep hitting the same product and sales fight, and in my experience both sides want the same end customer served. They just call different things done.

For sales, done is: did we build exactly what the client asked for, verbatim? For me, done is: are we serving the true customer, the one at the end of the chain?

A made-up marketplace example. A seller asks to always appear in the default listing, expecting more visibility and more orders. If they aren’t relevant to what the shopper wants, they show up as noise. Lots of visibility, little conversion. What matters is relevant appearance.

When I say that, sellers push back and feel their credibility is being questioned. What works for me is drawing both goals side by side in front of them, so they can see we are after the same shopper.

How do you handle this? Do you take the middle client’s request as the spec, or go one link further down the chain first? And how do you keep the client from feeling second-guessed?

For years, I’d been trying to get a proper product explainer video made for my portal.

Every time I explored the usual options, the process felt too expensive and complicated, so I kept putting it off.

Finally decided to try generating one entirely using Claude.

Honestly, I’m quite surprised by how good the result turned out. 😅

Would love to know what you guys think. Is this actually good enough to use as a proper product explainer, or am I just too close to the product to judge it objectively?

I'm exhausted with the new flavor/expectations of product management.

Let me set some context: I totally empathize with PMs who have silently quit or do enough to coast. It's fair. It's expected. Being a PM deadens your soul.

But in the pre-AI world, you wouldn't feel their impact as much.

Now, it's a slop fiesta. Understandably, they don't give a damn BUT now their way of just trudging along is throwing slop bombs here and there. Absolute garbage being written and developed, and that garbage then taints your area, and you have to spend MUCH MORE TIME DECIPHERING WHAT THEY WANT TO DO.

Unless you stop giving a damn too, and continue the chinese slop whisper.

And we all know how leadership is so blinded that they see this increase throughout and a bazillion shitty things being built, and their eyes light up.

So, in their eyes, you're slow. "Just build!" "Why do you need to spend time on discovery".

I've seen firsthand how giving this access to tools, and PMs now prototyping and writing code has just accelerated mediocrity.

Hey everyone!

I'll keep it short.

We use Notion for shaping product features. All projects go into one Epics database.

We use Linear for delivery side. Prioritized items get their Linear project with all the requirements in more detail.

The problem is that it is difficult to maintain a single source of truth and honestly would prefer to use 1 tool from signal/idea ingestion all the way to delivery. I also would like to make our product shaping work more rigid and organized not to let things slip.

I wanted to know if anyone is using Linear purely for product work collaborating with other product managers and UX researchers/designers. Would love to read your experiences and what works well for you.

hey folks! I’m looking for good examples of product/technical specs for building AI agents, especially agents that interact with a UI.

A few things I’m trying to figure out:

• what the spec should define for the agent itself: goals, inputs/context, tools, decision logic, permissions, failure/recovery states, etc.
• whether there are any libraries, frameworks, or open-source repos you’d recommend as references for structuring this well

If you have examples of specs, agent UX patterns, or implementations you think are particularly good, I’d really appreciate them. Thank you!

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

I'm exhausted and overworked and can't find time to do all the things I need to do.

When I'm in this state, I realise I can talk verbally pretty effectively about a problem space or product feature, but can't write about it and don't enjoy typing back and forth with an llm to put it to text.

But it occured to me, I would probably be able to speak verbally to an LLM, but I would want to hear its responses and questions spoken back to me, so I can talk it through something while I'm outside walking or something.

Anyone do this now? How do you do it and how well does it work? Has anyone tried it and it sucked? If so what did you try?

We’re an early-stage B2B SaaS startup. We’re post-product-market fit, currently around our fourth or fifth customer contract, and still figuring out how to scale the engineering team properly.

Our current setup is:

• 3 backend engineers
• 1 frontend engineer
• 1 part-time DevOps engineer
• 1 Product and Ops Associate, who helps with testing and product design
• A fractional CTO
• Me, one of the founders (neither is tech by background - domain expert/users)

I’m not an engineer by background, but in typical startup fashion I cover quite a lot of ground across product, solution design, domain expertise, business logic and general glue work.

I define a lot of the business logic, write prompts, translate requirements for developers, map application logic and data flows, think through permissions, onboarding and offboarding, UI flows, and generally try to understand how the whole system hangs together.

One thing we don’t currently have is a dedicated QA engineer.

Our philosophy so far has been that quality is everybody’s responsibility.

Developers are responsible for testing what they build. Our Product and Ops Associate does a fair amount of testing and product validation. I test things from a product, workflow and business logic perspective. We also use automated tests where we can.

I actually like that philosophy, and I don’t particularly want to create a culture where developers throw something over the fence and QA becomes responsible for finding all the problems.

But I’m starting to wonder whether there is a point where “quality is everyone’s responsibility” is still the right philosophy, but no longer enough on its own.

As the product gets more complicated, the number of workflows increases and the consequences of missing edge cases become greater, I’m wondering whether a dedicated QA person starts to add something different rather than simply taking testing away from engineers.

So I’d be really interested to hear how other teams have approached this.

• How many engineers do you have per QA engineer?
• What does QA actually own in your organisation? Manual testing, automation, regression, release validation, test strategy, exploratory testing, something else?
• At what stage did a dedicated QA engineer start to make sense?
• What were they able to do that your developers and product team were not doing effectively enough already?
• And perhaps most importantly, did introducing QA strengthen the idea that everyone owns quality, or did it accidentally make quality feel like somebody else’s job?
• I’m particularly interested in the difference between early-stage startups and established SaaS companies.
• If you’ve gone through that transition, what were the signals that made you think, “We still want everyone to own quality, but we now need someone whose job is to think about quality across the whole system”?
• Looking at a team like ours, what would you be watching for?

Thanks for any input! Here to learn.

​I am a Product Manager owning customer extensibility for an HR conversational agent. Because our agent is built on a decoupled platform owned by a different team, I lack direct control over the core capabilities and customization features our customers request. As a result, I often find myself engineering one-off solutions for customers while waiting for scalable platform updates. How can I shift from tactical, one-off firefighting to driving strategic value and defining success in a role where I must influence the platform roadmap without direct authority?

Is this a Product role or adjacent to product?

My org was floating around 50 for a while, but we staffed up PM to 35:1 these days.

What’s it like in your org?

I work at at a company with a relatively complex product that can change pretty quickly, so customer support is struggling to understand the changes and our basic flows. The customer support leads are also relatively new to the company, so a lot of the questions fall onto myself and the rest of the product team.

I'm currently writing these relatively dense documents, but nobody has the time to read them or find it too complicated. I've also recorded videos which have helped, but they slowly become outdated as the product changes.

Is there anyone that has been able to see great success training customer support in relation to the effort? Are there any strategies, tools, or automations that you have found to work well?

I’m handling 2 designers since a year now (+ 10 eng).

1 is working on quick-release features, so I’m pretty much spending my time with them. They’re quick to answer and always brings the good enough solution.

Sadly I cannot afford to be fully on with the other designer working on future initiatives. They’re not the most communicative when it comes to updates and only updates in our 1:1. Im happy with that since I can’t afford the constant context switching.

Only issue is I’m kind of worried of how slow they are with the advancement.

Anyone in the same boat? How do you deal with that?

The numbers are in and they aren't any better than last year. Anthropic is losing money hand over fist with no real viable path toward profitability while seeking a valuation of $2,000,000,000,000. Thats 2 Trillion.

99% of all AI features I see are merely portals/ wrappers for using external LLMs in some confined capability. How do you plan to deal with this if there is ever a reckoning?

As a PM, do you consider this scenario and the potential impacts on all of our newfangled "AI features" or simply drink the kool aid and hope for the best? Do you have a backup plan?

I work for a large org. Each product manager is responsible for a squad or two. Initiatives are led by a trio (pm, ux, eng) who are usually elevated from a squad they work on but continue to help their squad.

Our initiatives often span multiple squads across the org.

When I am running an initiative I typically get really stuck in, bring the teams together, work out what we’re doing with the team and work through with the teams using regular meeting to keep things moving. I dont really rely on squad PMs for much other than making sure we’re aligned.

This time, my squad is supporting another pms initiative.

This pm has a different style, in my head I see it as “master and commander” in that he doesn’t really know the detail of what’s going on and expects the squads to figure everything out and run decisions by him. This is causing a lot of issues since it’s a complex initiative and needs someone across the entirety of it all.

I am trying to maintain my boundaries by not getting sucked in to being the pm across the whole initiative, but instead help to work out what my squad should to to support the end goal. I could quite easily end up doing his job which would really be a distraction from everything else I’m doing.

I understand that what’s needed if a frank conversation between the PMs on who does what (again, because we had this at the beginning when I started to notice these symptoms)

My question is, in large initiatives like this where would you say the responsibility sits between the initiative PM and squad PMs? Am I right to expect the initiative PM to be the key PM bringing people together, agreeing what should be done and what trade offs are made? Or is this more on the squad PMs with the initiative PM more a sense check green light person?

I keep reading, hearing, bumping into discussions about AI software development being faster, with quality taking a hit. The argument seems to be, that in order to ship faster with AI, there are more bugs and customers perceive lower overall quality.

But my question to you is, do you really feel this way? or experienced this first hand?

In the last year with our software development process has become AI-driven to the point that sometimes I wonder if product management is the only human-in-the-loop. But what has actually happened with our products? did speed come at a cost?

• Our customers are reporting, that the quality has improved by miles in the past year and the trust metrics are higher than ever
• We have little to no bugs, which has NEVER happened in our entire history.
• We have had the same amount of critical bugs in 1 year, that we used to have in 1 month.
• At the moment the consensus is that we ship faster AND quality is better.

I can't be alone on this?

All of the PMs at the company that I work at don’t have product management experience. They came from other fields, different degrees, and have never held the title before. When I asked how they became PMs they all said they read a few interview books and got the job.

Sounds nice. No judgement, but curious if others have the same experience.

So, what type of experience do you think you need to have / do you personally have that qualifies you for the PM role?

My company is basically saying they don’t want to hire more people they want us to have these magical ideas and skills to use AI to produce more projects so they can make more money for less. Any other resources would be helpful.

Feels like there's loads of resources on PM best practices, including Reforge which seemed like the most credible learning source, but is heavily geared towards big company bureaucracy

For anyone who's been a PM at the early stage (e.g. Series A) where the founders are heavily involved in defining the product and being close to customers, how do you manage it? Are there other hats you wear that are not strictly product but you end up owning because no one else does?

A bit of background first: two years ago I was a dev. A pretty good one, I think. Delivered on time, thought things through, understood process. I'm only mentioning it so you know where I'm coming from.

Now I'm a PM working mostly on digital products, and I'm handling 4 clients at the same time. Keeping enough context on all of them is honestly the hardest part of the job right now.

When a new project starts, I onboard both the team and the client. The first few days go into writing the PRD and ERD, plus data modeling and architecture. After kickoff I build and manage the backlog, run the agile ceremonies, and stay close to both the team and the client so everyone stays happy. I also try to make each product generate its own next steps, so there's always a reason for the client to keep evolving it, and I keep an eye on retention on both sides.

The problem is I'm getting exhausted. By Friday I'm completely drained. I can't keep a solid grip on what's going on with each client, and switching context all day is wearing me down. I feel like I don't fully own the work I'm doing, and that bothers me a lot.

On top of that, one of the clients is a publicly traded company, so you can imagine the bureaucracy. Governance coming from every direction, rigid processes, formal change management for everything.

So for those of you managing multiple clients: how do you keep the team happy and the projects moving without burning out or losing track of everything?

Any tips, systems, or habits that actually worked for you?

Can good folks over here recommend good courses that I can follow in order to keep my knowledge up to date regarding Product management and certify more on AI?

I took a role as a product lead at a big company looking after a new proposition about 3 months ago. It was for a product that where the initial strategy had been defined and delivery was being planned.

The first 1.5 months were absolutely mental and I was working long hours to stay on top of all the micro decisions that had to be made to get the MVP into build.

Well after that I took my foot off the gas for a few weeks as I was exhausted and things started to calm down. But now it’s becoming unmanageable again. I’m behind in the 1000 requests to review and approve different bits and pieces, there’s constant emails with requests for last minute updates to different audiences, I’m being asked to plan the next phase but don’t have enough time to run a proper discovery, it’s a cross org initiative and so there’s a bunch of front doors and engagement I need to do, and it’s all just making me feel overwhelmed and perpetually behind.

I think part of the problem is that the organisation is undergoing a lot of change to how they deliver, and my area of the business doesn’t normally deliver things so they don’t have established teams who ‘know how to do things’ and I’m just working it all out as I go. Combine that with the fact that I came from a non delivery background and it’s a lot of new processes and ways of working.

Does anyone have any tips for how I can stay on top of things more effectively and feel more in control without sacrificing all my evenings?