What are the biggest challenges of being a product manager?
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Saying that anyone can become a product manager is just as true as saying anyone can become a doctor, a chef, a lawyer, or a musician. It will come more naturally to some people than others, but everyone needs to work hard to become great at their chosen career. As a relatively young discipline, product management doesn’t have the wide range of degrees, institutes, and training options established for careers like software engineering or design, or even acting. This makes it harder to start in product management. It’s also part of the magic though: people bring their own unique experience to the role, from all walks of life. They’ve built up some product management skills in their original career and have worked hard to fill the gaps while transitioning.
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Rather than providing solutions, a large part of product management is spending time in understanding the problem – probing it from different angles, breaking it down to expose the underlying problems and identify the fundamental assumptions. Then you must explore all these areas with your engineers, designers, and growth managers, form hypotheses and test them, and build up potential solutions as a team. People mistakenly get the impression that becoming a product manager is the only way to influence the product, but this just means you’re not including everyone’s strengths and expertise enough during the product discovery stage. As a product manager, you are part psychologist, scientist, and artist – and the master of none of these. And yet, for all this, product management is incredibly good fun!
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Like acting, product management is harder and more subtle than it appears on the outside. Like good actors, good product managers make it seem natural and effortless. Like actors, product managers are seen as the lead role, when in reality there is an entire team pulling together. From the outside we only see the public face of a film or TV show; the actors get all the attention, while the directors, screenwriters, camera operators, editors, musicians, costume, and make-up artists work tirelessly behind the scenes. People often assume that product managers are calling the shots, deciding what to build, and operating unilaterally. It can seem like an attractive, simple role. In reality, it’s so much more than deciding what to build. It’s so much more than telling people what to do. It’s so much broader than people expect.
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As a relatively young discipline, product management doesn’t have the wide range of degrees, institutes, and training options established for careers like software engineering or design, or even acting. This makes it harder to start in product management.
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I second that. Product managers need to make decisions that should be data-driven but because of lack of data, sometimes a PM jumps in the dark. Lack of data affects the decision-making capacity of a Product Manager. It is important to provide proper data for any decision a PM makes.
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Product Managers from leading companies around the world quoted that the most significant product management challenge is setting roadmap priorities without having customer feedback. A few challenges Product Managers face could be listed as below
1 – Overwhelming Time Constraints.
2 – Temptation to Be a Reactive Instead of Proactive Product Manager.
3 – Lack of Control in Product Management.
4 – Tension Between Your Short and Long-Term Product Management Objectives.
5 – Varying Opinions About the Direction to Take Products.
6 – Changing Market Dynamics Impacting Product Management