r/ProductManagement

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 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?

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'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!

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 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?

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?

https://preview.redd.it/76a43v6mx9kh1.png?width=597&format=png&auto=webp&s=eedf8b59452058283baefa3800d3df63e0edcbe8

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?

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.

Hi guys, I have PM experience of close to 4 years. Currently I am looking for new opportunities.

Was curious to know if there is anything like "Freelance Product Manager" ?

If yes, where do you find such opportunities? Is it worth it?

Thoughts?

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

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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’ve been wondering about this lately. Are PMs still actually paying for tools like ChatPRD, or have most people just moved to using ChatGPT/Claude for writing and refining PRDs? I’ve tried using general-purpose AI for this kind of work, and honestly, it feels like it can handle most of what these dedicated PRD tools are doing.

I get that tools like ChatPRD have more PM-specific workflows, templates, context, and integrations, but I’m having a hard time seeing why I’d pay for a separate tool when I can give Claude or ChatGPT the right context and get pretty much the same result. Maybe I’m missing something about the workflow that makes these tools genuinely better in practice.

So for anyone who actually uses ChatPRD or similar tools, what am I missing? Is there a real advantage that makes the paid tool worth it, or is this one of those things where a good prompt and a general-purpose AI tool gets you 80–90% of the way there?

Currently a PM at a company in platform security. It’s very engineering-led. Features are designed by architects and engineers who know the OS deeply, vulnerabilities are found by red teams, my “customer” is the internal CISO who wants the platform secure. We have huge customers that only speak with my manager and LT and the requirements trickle down to me from there.

I still get to prioritize what we work on and when, using the business impact as the main driver and doing market research to help define impact, but I feel like I am sorely lacking the discovery/finding requirements piece. I am applying to product roles and feel like a fish out of water.

Is this common? Am I missing something here?Am I just a program manager, or is there an angle here to sell myself as a product manager? Any advice to either frame this differently or find more opportunities to find customers will be welcome.

I’m currently working in Saudi Arabia at a non-profit/cultural organization, and my role is around membership strategy.

Lately I’ve been wondering if what I’m doing actually falls under Product Management, or if I’m more in the CX/CRM/membership space.

My work involves developing membership tiers and value propositions, looking at member needs and pain points, improving the membership journey and experience, retention/renewals, NPS, engagement, pricing, segmentation, and working with different teams to improve the overall membership product.

So I’m curious:

Would you consider this Product Management experience?

Is membership product management an actual niche?
What about Product Management within non-profits, cultural institutions, or the Saudi/GCC market — is this something worth exploring?

What niche areas do you think would be a good fit for someone with my background?

And if I wanted to move more formally into Product Management, are there any certifications you’d actually recommend?

Would also love to hear from anyone who moved into Product from a non-traditional background. What helped you make the transition? :)

I’ve been thinking about something and wanted to get opinions from people here.

A lot of professionals with 20–30+ years of experience step away from full-time work, but still have a lot of knowledge and may be open to doing something part-time or on a consulting basis.

At the same time, smaller companies sometimes need senior expertise for a specific problem but may not want to hire someone full-time.

For example, if a startup needs help with sales strategy, finance, HR, operations, etc., would it make sense to speak to someone who has spent decades working in that function for an hour or two?

Curious to know:

• Do startups actually look for this kind of expertise?
• How do you currently find such people?
• Would you pay for a short consultation if the person had relevant experience?
• For experienced/retired professionals here, would this kind of flexible work interest you?
• What would make you hesitant?

Just trying to understand whether this is a real need or something that sounds better in theory. Would love some honest perspectives.

I had a Product Management interview the other week, and as part of my pre-interview ritual, I always revisit Diego Granados' YouTube channel to brush up on PM frameworks.

His videos are honestly some of the best out there: clear, practical, and more than enough to help you crack many PM interviews.

But this time, I couldn't find his channel anywhere. It looks like it's completely vanished.

Does anyone know what happened? Was the channel deleted, moved, or rebranded?

I'm genuinely sad. It was such a valuable resource. 😞