Is this level of pivoting normal?
I work in product management at a large enterprise software company (~70k employees). I’ve been in product for about 15 years and at my current company for 6.
I’m not technically a people manager, but I’m responsible for a large product area with multiple PMs and engineering teams. Some of the PMs report into the same manager as me, some don’t, but I’m generally seen as the person leading this area both internally and externally. Historically, I’ve been very good at keeping teams aligned, focused, and stable even in high-pressure environments.
Lately though, I feel like I’m failing my teams, and I honestly can’t tell if this is just what big tech is like now or if something is fundamentally broken in my product org.
What’s hard is that this didn’t used to feel like the culture here. The company itself hasn’t changed that much in size, but product leadership changed over the last year and a half, and ever since then it feels like we’re in a constant cycle of pivots anytime there’s friction.
A pattern I keep seeing:
- leadership declares something a top priority
- teams work insanely hard to build a plan
- engineering/architecture/product spend time aligning
- people ramp up in entirely new domains
- and then the second dependency or political friction shows up internally, leadership suddenly wants to pivot to something completely different instead of working through the problem
The latest example honestly pushed me over the edge mentally.
A couple months ago, we pivoted a huge portion of our teams toward a completely new strategic area this was so we could compete with some of our competitors in a new market (new for us).
We spent a massive amount of time figuring out how we could realistically deliver it since it’s not an area most of us had prior experience in and not really an area we ever competed/sold in but our competitors do. From day one, it was known that another internal product area needed to deliver a few key capabilities for us to succeed.
Those dependencies were prioritized and we met with that product area very regularly pretty much 2 to 3 times a month.
Then week before last during a regular sync with that product area, we found out that org had shifted priorities and was no longer planning to deliver a bunch of those capabilities. Nobody had communicated it proactively.
I raised this in our executive review on Monday last week and basically said:
“Hey, this initiative is now at risk unless we either cut scope, make product tradeoff decisions, or figure out another path.”
To me, that’s a normal product conversation. My ask of my EVP in this meeting was that we organize a meeting with this other product EVP to just figure out if we could do some of the work we could help fund the work or if we should really just make some product trade-offs.
Instead, by last Wednesday, my leadership wanted to pivot to an entirely different product vision instead of trying to solve the alignment issues or make product decisions around scope/capabilities.
And this is exactly what happened on another major initiative ~5 months ago too.
At this point, people are exhausted.
4 PMs I work closely with have privately told me they’re burned out and have started looking elsewhere. I’m hearing similar things from engineering partners too. These are genuinely talented people, and I think what’s wearing them down isn’t hard work, it’s the constant churn and lack of stability.
I’ve also raised concerns to my own manager multiple times because I genuinely think we’re at risk of losing a significant portion of the team if this continues. The response is usually some version of:
“We’ll be fine. If we pivot, we pivot.”
But I don’t think leadership fully understands the cumulative impact this is having on people. The PMs that report to the same manager as me feel like he’s not listening to them. I’ve tried my best to get him to listen as the most senior person on the team, but his mindset is product has to pivot, especially in the world of AI and things are moving fast and we should be ready to pivot at any time and that’s that.
Honestly, I suspect one of the only reasons more people haven’t already left is because the job market has been rough.
What I’m struggling with is:
- Is this just how large tech companies operate now?
- Is everybody dealing with this level of strategic whiplash?
- How do you build trust with teams when priorities seem to disappear the second things get politically difficult?
- And how do you know when a company has crossed the line from “moving fast” into just organizational thrash?
I’m honestly trying to calibrate whether I need to adapt better to this environment or whether this is a sign that it may eventually be time for me to move on too.
Any advice.