Is being a product manager at tech company is stressful?
Well.. I would say it is as stressful as you allowed to be. But If you’re a Data PM (as I’m now) your job is at-least defined. Most tech company PM’s are tech majors by virtue of
I heard this from one of my peers:
“As a product manager, you are part psychologist, scientist, and artist — and the master of none of these.”
First, being a product manager (in a true sense of the word) is an amazing experience. For as long as I’ve been doing this I feel like every day is challenging to step-up and learn. People may like you, may dislike you or even may try to burn you for fun. You never know. Still, it’s a very entertaining and positive incentive to work as a product manager. New treasures uncovered! New secrets revealed! New monsters captured and tamed!
Now, about those stressful negatives. As I have mentioned before, a few may not like you . For example, a Sales Engineer may dislike that you told his client that a specific feature will be ready in Q3, while he promised it will be ready in Q1 (which is about 2 weeks from being over). Technically he was the one who lied, but it’ll be on you because you didn’t meet customer’s expectations.
You may end up doing the marketing department’s job when the same Sales Engineer comes back 2 hours later and asks for “product collateral” to show his next client. If you let the marketing do its job it will take 3 weeks and you need collateral tomorrow.
You’ll have to sell your product internally first, and the reaction you get from internal stakeholders will be vastly different from the reaction of actual customers. What I’ve noticed is that there’s usually no more than 25% overlap.
Generally, if your product is successful, you’ll see a lot of people trying to hook up to the boat. In most cases you will need them — you cannot develop the product while supporting, selling, onboarding and so on. However, you will end up doing all of the above in addition to all your other responsibilities while each team gets up to speed.
If your prototype is not successful, you’ll end up having to explain why you have wasted all this time, money and resources on something useless. Shouldn’t you be doing something more useful for the company, since they’re not paying you for wasting even more money than was wasted on your salary?
Add to that competing priorities, when you create a solution for one problem only to be asked if this solution is any good at solving a completely different one. What, it’s not? Oh, well, scrap that, we need a new product, this one doesn’t do what we need it to do.
Ultimately, if you keep digging, almost everything you do as PM through out the day (although can’t be quantified) will bring you some level of stress. The way I learned to manage it is to treat it just take one challenge at a time and if you don’t succeed at first — there’s always a way around whatever your challenge is.
