Struggles of a Product Manager

Being a Product Manager is not easy, the path is completely restless. It seeks continuous addition in your knowledge, upgrading about technology getting used in the industry, continuous learning both kind of hard and soft skills and whatnot. Not just this, product managers are responsible for quite a long list of tasks. Starting from making an organization’s strategy into a successful product, handling their stakeholders, collaborating with various product teams, to prioritize and launch that product successfully. The role itself is demanding and that brings more struggle and complication to the tasks with it. In this blog, we will try to address all the kinds of struggles of a Product Manager and will try to seek their solutions too.

To begin with, let’s talk about the most concerned one.

1. Too many tools to use

While researching tools used for Product Development, we got a long list of 80+ tools available in the market for Product management. These tools help Product Managers to define their products, manage product teams and collaborate in the process of product development. Now the struggle starts when a PM has to use 20 different tools for each of the stages. For writing any document, a PM uses JIRA, Google doc etc for scheduling or prioritizing tasks a product manager uses a roadmap, roadmunk etc. for analytics purposes a product manager, again has different tools, for team communication slack, hangout is often used, for stakeholder management a product manager uses a different tool. This whole process makes things more complicated. Well, no tool in the market can make you integrate all these things under one tool. We at zeda.io are trying to build a platform for product managers which can help them to define, manage and collaborate their product under one platform. You can also request early access under the following link.

2. Too many opinions

There are going to be as many opinions as many team members you have in your product team. Each one of them will have their best way of making a product and getting it on the market. Your task gets complicated when you have to listen to too many opinions and make it a success with the right approach. You may find it difficult but you need to learn the art of handling multiple personalities with different backgrounds and yet making them feel best about their and your opinions on your product.

3. Lack of data

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.

4. Too many stakeholders

There are different types of stakeholders that a product manager handles. Each of them has different priorities and expectations of the product. You as a product manager may have different priorities than your stakeholders. So it’s important to be on the same page for better delivery of products. By stakeholders, we don’t mean just by the ones who invest in your product or who you have as board members. Also, it’s important to understand who your stakeholders are. Your customers are your stakeholders too, their reviews matter and hence they can change your decisions. Your team is your stakeholder too, their decisions can directly influence the product. Now we see multiple people getting involved in the process and this will create open space for ideas and suggestions from different people. For a product manager, it gets important to have stakeholder management skills handy to handle this kind of situation.

5. Managing without authority

In product management, a product manager often handles things without authority. Lack of control in product development affects the effectiveness of a product manager. You as a product manager need to take the consensus of all other people associated with the product team before making any major decisions. This is another pain point that a Product manager goes through. A company should give authority to a product manager to make certain decisions of his/her choice to make the process more smooth.

6. A lot of operation work than strategy

Most of the time a product manager spends in operational work, time is consumed in writing documents, arranging meetings, getting feedback and bridging up with different verticals of the product teams. Whereas most of the time should ideally be spent on making strategies and market research. This decreases the efficiency of the product manager when he/she gets entangled with all the operational work.

These were a few pain points of product managers which we tried to address in our blog. The list is never-ending because the role itself is so challenging and complicated. Tell us about your struggles as a product manager in the comment section, we would love to hear from you.

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