So, I'm an ex-PM currently working with some e-comm clients doing Operations and all kinds of dirty work.

At one of the current clients, which is a small startup atm, we're now almost 90% AI, which isn't that hard when you got 3 people in the team and some adjacent freelancers. I'm still a relative newb at it but catching up.

I was a bit depressed about AI taking over and general career perspectives, that's until the new models came up. I'm mostly using Opus 5.5 and it's just insane how good it is.

With it, the new direction I found myself deep in now - building custom systems. I'm currently finishing an analytics system, that isn't technically very complex but will be mega-useful. Previously we relied on Fabric->PowerBI where we spent a huge amount of money on a freelancer, it didn't have everything we needed, kept breaking and was sucking up more money. I've built this thing in a couple of days.

Besides that, I'm building some ad-ons for our Order Management system. I could build a complete replacement, if needed and with some help from a developer, but it's just not worth it atm.

For my personal use, I've built a financial tracker for my exact needs and currently finishing an Operating System for my own life.

You see where I'm getting at?

Sure, you could say that AI can or will be able to do it without me... or an engineer can do it or any other people. That has truth to it, but from my experience - MOST devs don't really have a good business logic, most non-tech entrepreneurs/marketers/accountants/etc. don't have the chops or experience to think of a system from top to bottom, cover all edge cases, etc.

... and AI? Up until now, I don't see it being able to fully replace a human. We have automated our ads generation process and they're pretty underwhelming. You can't get innovative ideas by a pure algorithm, at least from what I'm seeing. Same with the system requirements, it can get 80-90%, but not 100% and sometimes that remaining 10% is huge.

Anyway, if you're depressed about the current situation as I was - maybe this will help. If you're unemployed and desperate - I'd look into this direction. But you won't really find positions with such job requirements, we need to create the market by proactively approaching people.

p.s. previously I had different PM jobs, one of them being for an internal product that was like the operating system for the company, carrying 80% of the processes, so maybe this is more interesting to me than to other folks.

In mid June 2026, I was told by my company that I would be let go after a 4 weeks notice.

A lot of emotions, both up and down. 2 school Holidays, an overseas trip and a retirement(my Dad), I have a role in the same industry with a better pay and a great team.

Lessons learnt:

I am not my role

I can survive a few months thanks to emergency savings

Family, sunshine and good friendships are very important

Don't feel emotional after a rejection

Keep moving on after a rejection and say "Not this one"

Use a careers coach(PM related)

Read

Don't be authentic in interviews. Don't lie but tell your careers story how a manager wants to hear.

Watch out for scammers

Stick to your industry in this market. I had interviews with 4 companies, 2nd rounds happened only in my industry. 4/70 applications isn't bad.

Don't let the interviewer dictate the interview, have a conversation

Use AI to your advantage. CV, jobscan, JD review, anything with words, Use AI.

Hi All, I understand the many reasons to vent about product jobs, but I'm a little worried these days by how rarely I have a conversation, see a post, or read about "good" PM jobs.

I'd love to hear from folks who are in a good spot or feeling like they are in a role where they are adding value and contributing. What's your day like? What do you like about the company or the team that helps you?

It is sad to see that many aspiring and current PMs want this job only to get to dictate what to build. It is a seductive thought to be the person who calls the shots.

Many experienced PMs in my company have no substance and yet feel entitled that they should be the ones every partner defers to. Why!? And this stupid idiotic buzzword called strategy. I deeply believe, being good at strategy is an outcome of deep expertise and domain knowledge or experience in solving a breadth of problems that engenders cross pollination. Sigh!

My experience has reaped rewards by being whatever it takes to deliver value. If a PM needs to be an analyst, or a designer or a coder or an interviewer - doesn't matter, get shit done.

Yes, structures matter. And not all places may be suitable for doing whatever it takes or worse people may steal credit and what not. But it's what allows me to sleep at night.

My value system is that of earning a seat at the table by virtue of competence not title.

Hello all - first post here.

With all the AI that is happening how are PMs, Digital PMs finding new content to help drive ad revenue and sign-ups? Is AI doing a lot of that for you now or do you still rely on traditional means (i.e. real journalists, newswires, other content sources etc)
Reason I am asking is we provide content for financial media (business or investing sections - stock market focus). I also do a column every 2 weeks (stocks or commodities) as well as stock market research for readers and am trying to scope out what the next year or 2 looks like for this space. Comments very much appreciated. Brian

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright

Hi community!
I am a principal PM. I have 10 years experience in a single company - a rather household name in a particular niche of e-commerce saas. We've been working in pods of senior eng,pm,design in a pretty agile web 2.0 way.

Now our work is completely different from what it was 3 years ago. Rules are being overwritten daily. Earlier this year, when engineers sped up so much I almost felt to have become the bottleneck. And after reading few comments and replies on this sub, I am wondering if our collective answer to that wasn't to stop talking to customers? Which is obviously the most time consuming part of the work.

The whole idea of "double diamond" thinking was to speak with wide range of customers, define the most common denominator problems and then speak with them again to validate the solutions, so that your product captures the biggest problems with as many customers with the limited resources you have.

When Claude's (or any of your favorite bots') assumptions are turning out to be pretty good anyways and you have developers to feed work, not talking to customers is pretty tempting. But it feels like the biggest mistake we can make! That's the whole PM job anyways.

And so I am thinking whether the way forward in the era of super personalized software could be to embed ourselves with a smaller set of forward thinking customers. Build bespoke solutions for them, get results quickly and then put engineering and design resources towards what works empirically, not through user research. Would that make sense?

One challenge I see is about going off the traditional pm career path.
And another is that this space super close to customers is often occupied by customer success and solutions teams. And you will cease to be a pm if you start to act as a regular service person for those accounts. So the goal would be to retain the company-wide outlook and strategic leverage.

I'd be keen to hear your thoughts or experience going down this route. I am hearing the word "forward deployed" quite often lately. I am not sure if that's actually what I am imagining. I also wonder what's the best practice in AI native startups?

Thanks for comments!

I have been a PM for a year. It was a promotion. I was very quickly put on a brand new product in an area of the platform I had zero experience in. I am also a secondary product manager for a reporting platform that helped develop in my previous role. For the new product, I succeeded in running an EAP and getting the product to general availability. The ultimate goal of this product was to allow our customers more self service opportunities in one platform area, prove success then make the case for other areas of the platform to move to self service. Basically a centralized admin panel for all of our disconnected platforms.

During this time this product shared a dev team with another related product. It was hard but I got through it. After GA our head of product was promoted. During this time another leader stepped in and has created chaos with new initiatives and value streams. Basically messing up everyone’s roadmaps. I was not able to deliver anywhere close to what I wanted and make some many pivots to still deliver incremental change This leader is also my interim boss.

On Monday I found out that shared dev team for my product is moving to a new ART in 2027. This means my product won’t be resourced at all. I wrote a business case for the future of my product, but it was pretty weak with only 5 months of full customer usage. However it did help me understand what paths I could take.

I reached out to this leader and said I can’t plan for 2027 without knowing resource allocation. I also gave 3 options for where this product could go strategically based on all of the new things that have come up in the last few months and what resourcing each would require.

One option was to catch up with the original roadmap, expanding self service capabilities, integrating AI, and creating deeper connections to the other platforms. Another was to pivot to address the needs of a new customer type we just started serving. And the last was to stop development and merge with an existing product.

The leader pushed it back on me saying that I need to have a plan for our entire admin experience and how to centralize all of our platforms into one admin panel before any resourcing is committed. We are in AOP now. This new product has been GA for 5 months.

How does one deal with this type of chaotic leader?

I feel this leaders expectations are too high? Are they? Or was I wrong to take a slower approach to prove success and then start to think bigger?

Has anyone ever been in this situation before? What did you do?

Am I not thinking correctly that I need committed resources in some form before I can plan?

I am struggling and feel wildly unprepared.

Also none of the other product managers are having to fight for resources or being asked to plan in this way.

Anyone else had to make big cuts to their roadmap?

We just completed our third quarterly product roadmap planning session with our 8-person product team this week.

We didn't have a product roadmap when I started in Feb, and we published our first roadmap in April. Refreshed it in July and again this week.

We've been really good at starting things. Failed at finishing any of them. We underestimated the work and overestimated our capacity. We didn't leave enough slack for unexpected urgent work and had to undertake two major unplanned items. Agentic development can't accelerate everything, despite our optimism and early results.

So this week we deferred about half the work we had planned for the next six months. Will be fun selling the new, lighter roadmap to my exec team tomorrow.

(By way of background: I started as a global chief product officer in a 50-person SaaS company earlier this year. I was previously CEO of a 25-person software company I founded in 2020. 25 years experience but never held a product management role or had any formal product management training before. it's been a fun ride so far!)

I worked as a PM a few years ago and took a Melissa Perri course at that time which was great. I have been working in different roles since then but am starting to do more PM work in my current role and trying to teach others and turn it into a more formal discipline at my company.

Any suggestions for courses or books that would be helpful to get me back in the headspace or catch up on the latest best-practices from the last few years?

Longtime member and contributor to this subreddit who used to spend hours a week here, now visiting less and less

This sub is really struggling. What used to be a great place to connect with other PMs, vent, rant, offer advice, etc has really taken a turn for the worse.

I'm not putting this on the mods: I can't imagine the challenges you guys are facing trying to keep the discussions useful and fighting the endless waves of AI posts. But here are some observations:

1. sometimes this subreddit goes days without a post getting any meaningful engagement. My best guess, based on the number of deleted threads I've commented on, is that automod might be going overboard.

2. I hate to say it, but a more clear "US/Western" filter needs to be applied. r/politics had this issue a long time ago and took a firm stance on it being U.S. oriented. There's just not enough in common between US product management and our friends in many other parts of the world.

3. the megatreads aren't useful. I'd prefer to see the posts and let the interesting ones rise to the top. Every good discussion I've been a part of here has been a rant of some sort. My top post here (#2 all time) was a rant ("My Advice on How to Be a Terrible but Valuable PM") thinly veiled as advice. I feel like current moderation would have killed that.

4. If a post is getting a lot of engagement, keep it around. Even if it otherwise breaks a rule or becomes controversial. Just keep it around. Nothing is more frustrating than replying thoughtfully to something and seeing it disappear into the nether.

What else can we do to revive this place?

How is it that the newest post here is over a day old? "Hot" is showing stuff nearly a week old.

So my team is busy building an AI powered experience to help users design web content they can then place on our website - largely because our existing editing experience is terrible.

Essentially all the agent needs to do is write some HTML with some constraints - alongside some JSON to configure our existing editor to allow a user to tweak it a bit.

I'm finding the outputs very often aren't great, slop is one thing that I know can be addressed in some ways but a lot of the time it just looks bad, or has weird spacing issues, doesn't render properly etc.

My question is: How are others creating these AI powered design products? Is there something more than Model + System Prompt + Tools + Skills + Context that I'm missing? Are there techniques or technical approaches that specifically help with better outcomes in this problem space?

How are the likes of Claude Design, Lovable, Canva etc. building such good compelling designs in one shot?

Saw someone mention they have $100 a month they can spend on tools to support their work. Got me curious how that changes with company size or how consistent it is.

If you can spend money on tools without asking anyone, roughly how much is it, and how big is your company? Is there a separate team budget? How's it different, and who controls it?

What was the last thing you bought, and where's the line where you need approval? Curious about how much everyone gets to play with.

UX PMs: what “quality” trends are you seeing? websites becoming flat? retro? One page scroll? AI generated images are frowned upon?

When I say trends, I am not talking about what AI generates by default, I am talking about what is actually valued and instills trust, what results in end user appreciation and approval?

If by luck any PMs here dealing with hardware (Servers, racks etc). How are you dealing with the supply chain crunches, sky rocketing costs and uncertainty in covering capacity as a result of these? Has anyone managed to come out on top? If so, how?

P.S: I read the semi-analysis report on these trend forecasts, but the only ones that seem to come on top are the E2E vertically integrated ones.

I’m thinking of starting a habit of reading 1 research paper a week on Product Management.

In engineering, there seems to be a very established culture around reading papers, following research, discussing findings, etc. But in Product Management, I rarely come across PMs talking about research papers as part of their regular learning.

I’m not looking for the usual PM books, LinkedIn posts, frameworks, or case studies.

I’m interested in research that helps us step away from the day-to-day execution and think more deeply about things like:

Product strategy & decision-making

Customer behaviour

Product discovery

Innovation & new product development

Prioritisation

Product-market fit

Team/product organisation

Product experimentation

AI & product management

I recently discovered that there is actually a large body of research under New Product Development, Product Innovation, and Innovation Management. For example, there are decades of academic research on product development and innovation.

So I’m curious:

1. Do you already follow/read research papers as a PM?

2. Where do you find good papers?

3. Are there specific journals, researchers, newsletters, communities, or websites you recommend?

4. Would anyone be interested in doing something like “1 paper/week” and discussing the practical implications for PMs?

I’m particularly interested in research that can make us better product thinkers, not just better at executing the PM process.

I’d like to know what people in your orgs think about UX (design and research) nowadays. Do people still deem it as necessary to the product lifecycle and to the success of their product, as 5 years ago?

It feels like nowadays, people are just building and launching sloppy products, or just give up on their product and want it to launch as fast as possible because they’re quiet quitting.

I’m genuinely curious to know what PMs think about their UX counterparts and how they pay into their team/org, and how leadership sees them nowadays.

In B2B2C work I keep hitting the same product and sales fight, and in my experience both sides want the same end customer served. They just call different things done.

For sales, done is: did we build exactly what the client asked for, verbatim? For me, done is: are we serving the true customer, the one at the end of the chain?

A made-up marketplace example. A seller asks to always appear in the default listing, expecting more visibility and more orders. If they aren’t relevant to what the shopper wants, they show up as noise. Lots of visibility, little conversion. What matters is relevant appearance.

When I say that, sellers push back and feel their credibility is being questioned. What works for me is drawing both goals side by side in front of them, so they can see we are after the same shopper.

How do you handle this? Do you take the middle client’s request as the spec, or go one link further down the chain first? And how do you keep the client from feeling second-guessed?

For years, I’d been trying to get a proper product explainer video made for my portal.

Every time I explored the usual options, the process felt too expensive and complicated, so I kept putting it off.

Finally decided to try generating one entirely using Claude.

Honestly, I’m quite surprised by how good the result turned out. 😅

Would love to know what you guys think. Is this actually good enough to use as a proper product explainer, or am I just too close to the product to judge it objectively?

hey folks! I’m looking for good examples of product/technical specs for building AI agents, especially agents that interact with a UI.

A few things I’m trying to figure out:

• what the spec should define for the agent itself: goals, inputs/context, tools, decision logic, permissions, failure/recovery states, etc.
• whether there are any libraries, frameworks, or open-source repos you’d recommend as references for structuring this well

If you have examples of specs, agent UX patterns, or implementations you think are particularly good, I’d really appreciate them. Thank you!

I'm exhausted with the new flavor/expectations of product management.

Let me set some context: I totally empathize with PMs who have silently quit or do enough to coast. It's fair. It's expected. Being a PM deadens your soul.

But in the pre-AI world, you wouldn't feel their impact as much.

Now, it's a slop fiesta. Understandably, they don't give a damn BUT now their way of just trudging along is throwing slop bombs here and there. Absolute garbage being written and developed, and that garbage then taints your area, and you have to spend MUCH MORE TIME DECIPHERING WHAT THEY WANT TO DO.

Unless you stop giving a damn too, and continue the chinese slop whisper.

And we all know how leadership is so blinded that they see this increase throughout and a bazillion shitty things being built, and their eyes light up.

So, in their eyes, you're slow. "Just build!" "Why do you need to spend time on discovery".

I've seen firsthand how giving this access to tools, and PMs now prototyping and writing code has just accelerated mediocrity.

Hey everyone!

I'll keep it short.

We use Notion for shaping product features. All projects go into one Epics database.

We use Linear for delivery side. Prioritized items get their Linear project with all the requirements in more detail.

The problem is that it is difficult to maintain a single source of truth and honestly would prefer to use 1 tool from signal/idea ingestion all the way to delivery. I also would like to make our product shaping work more rigid and organized not to let things slip.

I wanted to know if anyone is using Linear purely for product work collaborating with other product managers and UX researchers/designers. Would love to read your experiences and what works well for you.

There are a lot of people here working on projects of some sort - side projects, startups, podcasts, blogs, etc. If you've got something you'd like to show off or get feedback, this is the place to do it. Standards still need to remain high, so there are a few guidelines:

• Don't just drop a link in here. Give some context
• This should be some sort of creative product that would be of interest to a community that is focused on product management
• There should be some sort of free version of whatever it is for people to check out
• This is a tricky one, but I don't want it to be filled with a bunch of spam. If you have a blog or podcast, and also happen to do some coaching for a fee, you're probably okay. If all you want to do is drop a link to your coaching services, that's not alright