r/prodmgmt

I used to think I was a fairly hands-on PM.

Spoke to users.

Wrote detailed PRDs.

Made decent wireframes.

Could write basic SQL.

Sat with engineering during grooming.

Knew enough technical words to survive most discussions.

Then I tried building an actual working product with AI and realised how much of my job still ended at “someone else will figure this out”.

The product was simple on paper.

An internal tool where the sales team could upload call notes and get:

• repeated objections
• competitor mentions
• follow-up tasks
• accounts at risk of going cold
• patterns across the whole week

I had already made a PRD for something similar at work.

Around 11 pages.

User stories.

Edge cases.

Success metrics.

Flow diagrams.

Very proper.

During a GrowthX build week, I decided to actually build a rough version instead of writing one more document.

Used Claude for the first backend.

Generated a basic UI.

Connected a transcription API.

Added a database.

Got the happy path working in around two days.

Upload call.

Get summary.

See action items.

I was feeling quite smart.

Then two engineers reviewed it.

First question:

“What happens if the same call is uploaded twice?”

Had not thought about it.

“What if the transcript is 90 minutes?”

No idea.

“How are accounts being matched if the salesperson writes the company name differently?”

Not handled.

“Why are you sending the entire transcript to the model every time someone opens the account?”

Because that was the easiest thing to build.

“What does the confidence score mean?”

Whatever Claude had decided it meant.

That review was uncomfortable because none of these were exotic engineering problems.

They were product decisions hiding inside technical implementation.

In the PRD version, I could write:

“The system should intelligently identify duplicate calls.”

Sounds good.

When building it, I had to decide what duplicate actually means.

Same file?

Same salesperson and timestamp?

Same transcript?

What if a call gets uploaded once through Zoom and once manually?

I could no longer hide behind one elegant sentence.

Same with “surface important objections”.

Important according to whom?

Frequency?

Deal value?

Sales stage?

Whether the customer sounded angry?

Whether the competitor was mentioned?

The prototype forced me to confront how vague a lot of my product thinking was.

AI did make many PM tasks much cheaper for me.

Research summaries are cheaper.

First-draft PRDs are cheaper.

Wireframes are cheaper.

SQL is cheaper.

Basic prototypes are much cheaper.

Writing ten versions of microcopy is basically free.

But cheap does not mean solved.

The more AI handled the output, the more important these became:

• choosing the correct problem
• defining what good output means
• knowing which edge cases matter
• understanding technical trade-offs
• deciding what should not be automated
• getting the workflow adopted
• knowing whether the user will change behaviour
• deciding what happens when the model is wrong

AI helped me build a tool.

It did not tell me whether salespeople would trust it.

It did not tell me whether managers wanted summaries or only wanted missed follow-ups.

It did not tell me whether the company would allow customer calls to leave its system.

It did not tell me whether reps would correct bad output or quietly stop using the product.

Those are still product problems.

I do not think every PM now needs to become a production engineer.

I still cannot review backend architecture properly.

I am not going to pretend I can replace an experienced developer because I got a prototype running.

But I do think the bar has moved.

A PM who can build a rough workflow, put it in front of users and understand where it breaks will have a much better conversation with engineering than a PM who arrives with a 14-page PRD and says “technical feasibility to be assessed”.

The GrowthX experience was useful because nobody cared about how nicely I had framed the problem.

I had to show the screen.

Someone clicked the wrong thing.

The flow broke.

An engineer asked why I had made a decision.

I could not answer.

That taught me more than another session on AI product strategy would have.

My current view:

PM is not becoming less important.

A lot of PM output is becoming less valuable.

The PMs who survive will probably spend less time proving they are organised and more time proving they have judgment.

Curious how this is changing inside Indian companies.

Are PMs in your org expected to prototype now?

And when people say PMs should “become builders”, how far do they actually mean?

Functional prototype?

Basic code understanding?

Production ownership?

Or just better collaboration with engineering?

I’ve been interviewing for Product Manager roles for the last 4 months, and I’m trying to figure out whether my experience is normal or if I’m doing something fundamentally wrong.

Over this time, I’ve had multiple interview processes go all the way to the final rounds, only to get rejected. Sometimes I got feedback, sometimes I was just ghosted after 3–4 rounds. But the journey was much harder than I expected.

I’m curious what everyone else’s experience has been.

• Roughly what is your ratio between applications to recruiter call
• How do you apply? (Cold reachouts/ recruitment websites/something else)
• Do you feel the hiring bar has genuinely gone up, or are companies just interviewing a lot more people before making a decision?
• If you landed a PM role recently, what do you think made the difference? Referrals, a strong portfolio, domain expertise, networking, or just applying everywhere?
• Has anyone here decided to move away from PM because of how the market is?

I’m also wondering whether all these “AI Product Manager” roles represent actual hiring demand or if it’s mostly companies rebranding existing PM positions.

Would love to hear some real numbers and experiences. I’m trying to separate what’s just the current market from what I could be doing better.

Hey I am looking for someone who can offer mock interview feedback and help me transistion into PM role from analytics & DS domain.

Idea management and innovation management often get lumped together, but they are not really the same. One is about collecting and surfacing ideas, while the other is about taking an idea all the way through evaluation, approval, implementation, and measuring results. A lot of teams end up buying an idea collection tool expecting it to handle the full lifecycle, then run into problems once governance across departments becomes important. It's worth knowing the difference before shortlisting tools, since many stop at idea capture while others cover the process through evaluation, approvals, implementation, and ROI tracking.

I'm considering creating a tool to solve a problem I frequently encounter in SDLC: the disconnect between what's agreed upon in chats and meetings and what actually ends up in Jira, code, and tests.

The problem I see: A decision to change requirements is made in Slack or a meeting. Everyone nods, but no one updates the wiki/Jira. As a result, the developer or tester spends half the day working with old assumptions.

Solution idea: An assistant that is added to meetings, tagged in Slack discussions, and detects potential findings/changes in requirements, then generates a ready-made proposal to update the task for approval by the Tech Lead or PM (human-in-the-loop, zero AI arbitrariness).

In my experience, this is a real problem, but my experience is obviously limited, so I'd like to know what it's like for you:

How do your teams currently handle transferring decisions from Slack/meetings to Jira/documentation, and how often does this process "leak" in your case?

I’m looking for advice from people who have successfully landed Senior Product Manager roles at companies like Microsoft, Anthropic (Claude), Atlassian, Google, Uber, Rippling, Stripe, Freshworks, ThoughtSpot, Visa, and similar product first companies.
A bit about me:
I have around 8.5 years of experience across engineering and product. I understand code well and can comfortably work with engineering teams, but I’m not deeply skilled in areas like distributed systems, system design, or low level architecture.
Over the past several months, I’ve interviewed with 15 to 16 companies. I consistently clear the initial rounds, but I usually get rejected in Round 3 or Round 4. I’ve interviewed with companies like Microsoft, Visa, Freshworks, ThoughtSpot, and others.
The feedback is rarely specific, which makes it difficult to identify the real gap.
From your experience, what separates candidates who consistently reach the final rounds from those who actually receive offers?
Some questions I’m trying to answer:
If you had 6 to 12 months to prepare for Senior PM interviews, how would you structure it?
How important is system design for Senior PM roles? To what depth should a PM understand architecture?
What technical topics should I master beyond APIs, databases, cloud basics, and SDLC?
Is product sense or execution usually the deciding factor at senior levels?
How do you become exceptional at product strategy and metrics interviews?
Are mock interviews worth paying for? If yes, which platforms or coaches genuinely helped?
What books, courses, or resources had the highest ROI for you?
What mistakes do experienced PMs commonly make during interviews without realizing it?
My goal is to land a Senior PM role at a top product company within the next 6 to 12 months. I’m willing to invest the time, but I want to focus on the right things instead of preparing randomly.
I’d especially appreciate responses from people who have been in a similar situation and eventually broke through after multiple interview rejections.
Thanks in advance for any advice, preparation roadmap, or hard truths that helped you succeed.

I feel like my current interview answers are too generic and mostly summarize my resume rather than explaining why I’m uniquely a strong fit.

For example:

"I believe I'm a strong fit for this Staff PM role because I have 10 years of Product Management experience, including setting vision, defining strategy, and building roadmaps across [Company 1] and [Company 2]. These experiences align well with this role. I'm also excited about building the next decade of my career at [Company] because of the culture, customer impact, and opportunity to contribute."

How do senior and staff PMs approach this question? What makes an answer stand out?

Hi all — this is specifically for marketers who are in the process of trying to break into product management, not marketing in general, so apologies for the narrow ask.

I'm doing research on this specific transition and would love to talk to a few people currently living it. Not selling anything, no survey link — just want to hear real stories.

This is you if:

• You've got around 4–7 years in marketing and are currently applying to IC-level PM roles
• You're still employed in marketing while you search
• In the last few months you've done something concrete about it — built a case study/portfolio project, taken a PM course, worked with a coach, or applied to a good number of PM roles

If that's you, I'd really appreciate 20–25 minutes on a call — what's worked, what hasn't, what's actually been frustrating. Happy to share back anything useful I learn along the way.

Comment or DM and I'll send a scheduling link. Thanks for reading this far even if it's not you!

Hi everyone,

I’m preparing for Product Manager/APM interviews and looking for someone interested in doing regular case practice sessions together.

We can practice:

Product design cases (Improve X, Design a product for Y)

Product strategy cases

Metrics & analytics problems

Root cause analysis

Estimation/guesstimates

I’m hoping to find someone who is consistent and willing to give/receive structured feedback after each session.

A little about me: I am an IIT Delhi graduate currently working in Product at a fintech company and preparing for PM/APM opportunities.

The process ran six rounds, then three weeks in team matching, and finally clearing the hiring committee for an L5 Product Manager offer. The loop itself was one recruiter screen, two product design rounds, two execution and analytical rounds, and one Googlyness round.

A couple of questions I still remember. For product design, they asked me to design a localized, high-scale delivery product for a dense urban market like Tokyo. They really pushed on the localization and density angle, so don't just reskin a generic delivery product. The constraints are the whole point. The analytical round centered on YouTube launching a new creator monetization tool and measuring the metric trade-offs between immediate ad revenue and long-term creator retention. That one was less about picking the right metric and more about how you reason through competing priorities.

On prep, I used Product Alliance to study their Google roadmap breakdowns and mocked against their question bank. I also ran mocks with ChatGPT and Claude to drill frameworks and get fast feedback on structure. Then I did a few live peer mock sessions, and my final mock was with my brother, who used to be a senior PM. The AI mocks were great for volume and structure cause it's what I could afford at that moment, but I'd advice anyone to mock with humans if they can afford it.

So that's pretty much it.

Hey,

I'm a new PM/manager (came from a software engineering background, but I've also built and managed products in the past, some of them even my own). I joined this agency to take over a project that is now in week 9 of 16.

The team is small: 1 Tech Lead, 3 devs (1 senior, 2 mids), 1 QA and me as PM. We all work remotely. The situation is classic: messy project handover from the previous agency. Our job is to either fix the existing system or rewrite it to cover the client's critical use cases and hopefully earn a project extension.

The Tech Lead (working 5-10 hours/week on this project) and the senior dev joined first, about two weeks before everyone else. They came as a package from previous projects and they have tenure in this agency. I joined on week 3 and needed about two weeks to properly onboard, so you could say they drove the project for roughly the first four weeks.

The results were poor. The project I inherited was a collection of AI-generated Github Issues spread across multiple GitHub repos, with work happening mainly on low-value priorities while critical issues were either not clear or ignored. Tech Lead/Senior Dev aren't capable of managing other devs, all they can do is review some code and say a sentence or two in the daily standup, that's it. It's up to me to make sure devs are working on what they should be working, it's up to me to double check code scope with task scope, it's up to me to even track dev hours to make sure they are not billing for nothing (we had an issue in the past where 1 dev was billing like 2x the amount of hours he actually worked). We also didn't migrate from the previous agency's infrastructure until around week 5, which meant we couldn't even identify the real bottlenecks until then. Real development only started after I've onboarded and started pushing very hard for proper project and testing tools.

For the last 5 weeks I've been trying to get the project under control. I set up a proper Jira project, established daily team sync meetings, started running structured client meetings, managed the team and even bought out of my own pocket and personally delivered hardware just to unblock devs instead of waiting for delivery from the client overseas. Since then, delivery has noticeably improved.

The biggest challenge hasn't been the project itself. It's the leadership dynamic.

My expectation when I joined were simple. As a PM I expected to be able to decide what we build and when, while technical leadership advises me on how to implement it. Instead, I constantly feel like I'm fighting for ownership of the project. The two mid developers and QA have no issues with my structure. The problems are with the Tech Lead and the Senior developer.

1. Processes aren't being followed.

The senior dev (who for the record has very poor soft skills) regularly starts implementing "spike" tickets based on breadcrumbs from client meetings. Undocumented decisions end up being merged into production without acceptance criteria, documentation, or QA context. QA then asks me what they're supposed to test, and I end up reading code just to understand what changed. I also have no visibility on how much hours he's working as he logs these hours in the system only at the last day of the month, not daily how the rest of the team does it.

The Tech Lead (who is on this project only temporary and when he leaves the Senior Dev is supposed to become the new Tech Lead) spent weeks working on a UI redesign and last Friday decided that it's a good idea to demo it to the client before ever showing it to me or aligning on priorities. I have no visibility on what his goals and what he's working on.

2. Client communication is becoming messy.

I originally invited the Tech Lead and senior dev to client meetings because I wanted technical expertise in the room.

Instead, the now Tech Lead often dominates the first 30 minutes discussing long-term product/architectural vision or asking questions that should be asked on week 1 or week 2, not on week 9 of the project. It derails the meeting and makes it much harder to groom the work that actually matters right now. Tech Lead (who works maybe max 10 hours a week on this project) also feels that it's his place to decide on what are we commiting and what not, and feels like he's doing me some favours here, when in reality my decisions so far resulted in nothing but value for the client/project, while his decisions caused massive delays, in the beginning of the project.

3. Leadership isn't clear.

Basically it feels like I have all the responsibility but not the authority. I've tried bringing this up in our leadership chat groups with senior dev + tech lead but nothing is changing. I have experience driving much bigger projects successfuly and at this point having to deal with these two on such a small project is becomming surreal. They keep telling me that I'm the most responsible one here, but shouldn't freedom of decisions come with this as well?

I have over 400 hours on this project. The Tech Lead has around 80 max. I'm carrying the delivery responsibility, client communication, planning, prioritization, and day-to-day execution, but I'm still being second-guessed on decisions by someone whose contribution has mostly been a redesign proposal that won't even be used until if we don't get a project extension after 7 weeks. And the same Tech lead made very poor decisions initially, that basically are the root cause of us having to rush and having to do so much in such short time now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know something here. Perhaps, the Tech Lead, since he has more tenure in this agency knows something I don't - perhaps contract that we signed was not for 3-4 months but for 6 or 12 and I'm just ramping everything here for no good reason. I don't know anymore.

Tomorrow I have a leadership sync meeting. My plan is to raise these issues and call for a separate meeting with the Tech Lead, CEO, and COO.

My proposal is to make Tech Lead and the Senior developer my direct reports and that all information should flow through me. I also want to have separate meetings with the client 1on1 so we could go through priority things, and move techlead's to a separate meeting.

We have 7 weeks left. We don't have time for competing leadership or same endless debates. Technical decisions remain theirs, but project direction should come from one person, who has most context, which happens to be me.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

For those of you who've inherited struggling projects, how did you establish clear ownership when senior technical people resisted it?

I started a new Product Manager role at the beginning of this year, and it's my first time working in product management. I've been with the company for several years, but in a completely different function.

Honestly, I feel like I was misled about what this role would actually entail. My understanding of product management, and what was outlined in the job posting, included responsibilities like managing backlogs, conducting customer interviews, building roadmaps, prioritizing features, and being involved in the product lifecycle. During the interview process, I was very clear that I wanted to learn and develop those skills. At no point was I told that none of those responsibilities would be part of my day-to-day work.

The reality is that the product I support is owned by a completely different division within the company. We don't own the product strategy, roadmap, backlog, or development process. The other division essentially loans us the product to sell. Most of my work consists of joining customer calls, demonstrating the product alongside Sales, and helping move deals toward closing.

Had I known that was the actual scope of the role, I probably would have stayed in my previous position. I recently shared my concerns with my manager and expressed a desire to gain experience with more traditional PM responsibilities. Unfortunately, the conversation quickly shifted to, "Maybe this isn't the right role for you."

To be honest, I agree, it probably isn't. But here I am. 😩

For those who have transitioned into product management, especially without prior PM experience, is this kind of situation common? Has anyone else found themselves in a "PM" role that was really more sales-focused or product enablement-focused?

I'd love any advice on how to navigate this situation, build actual product management skills, and make myself more marketable for a true PM role elsewhere. I'm becoming more frustrated and disengaged by the day, and I'm trying to figure out the best path forward.

I have interview for product manager role at salesforce . What’s more important to keep in mind to land the offer . It’s highly competitive out there but still I wanna take my shot by maximizing the knowledge I have . Thanks in advance!!

Hi everyone from NZ,

I’m looking to transition into a Product Management role and would really appreciate advice from people who have made a similar move or who hire PMs.

My background is in the AgTech industry, where I’ve worked across customer success, sales, marketing, and technical support for precision agriculture cloud platforms. Those roles have given me the opportunity to work closely with customers, understand their challenges, troubleshoot technical issues, gather feedback, and help drive product adoption.

Through those experiences, I’ve realized that what I enjoy most is identifying customer problems, understanding the “why” behind them, and working with cross-functional teams to create better product experiences. That’s what has motivated me to pursue Product Management.

I’m currently building my PM knowledge around product discovery, prioritization, roadmapping, agile delivery, product strategy, and using data to make informed decisions. I’m also looking for opportunities to gain hands-on experience and build a portfolio that demonstrates product thinking.

I’d love to hear your thoughts:

If you were making this transition today, where would you focus your efforts?

What skills or experiences from customer success, sales, and technical support translate best into Product Management?

What projects or portfolio work helped you land your first PM role?

What advice would you give someone trying to break into Product Management without previous PM experience?

I’m keen to learn, put in the work, and would genuinely appreciate any advice, resources, or experiences you’re willing to share.

Thanks!

Currently IC6 PM at FAANG. I’m crushing interviews early round and getting to final stages. All five onsites I’ve interviewed at I’ve ended up being a top 2 or 3 candidate but not getting an offer. Reasons from company are always vague “we found someone whose background was a better fit” etc.

I was talking to a friend and he said I am probably being "too honest" and in this market "screw honesty" just say what you want them to hear. I'm absolutely against this and won't do it but got me thinking...

1) What are the buzzwords or attitude that leadership/ HMs want to hear today in L&D interviews? e.g. is it extreme accountability, super alpha aggressive leadership etc.?

2) Are people actively lying/ bullshitting more to land offers?

3) If you are someone who is crushing L&D interviews what do you think is resonating with HMs/ VPs?