Something You Need To Know About Product Manager Position

All Product Manager jobs are not the same.

The experience you have as a Product Manager at a company depends on a number of factors.

• Stage of the company (pre-seed, series A, IPOed, etc.)
• Role Expectations (full-stack vs. focused)
• The team (remote vs. on-premise, experience of members, motivation levels, caliber, etc.)
• Product Culture (top-down dictation, empowered, externally driven)
• Internal and external forces (red-ocean vs. blue-ocean market, existential crisis/funding race, etc.)

• Legacy code (high/low tech debt, sluggish vs. high velocity, etc.)
• Mindset for disruption (conservative vs. experimental, safe vs. risk-taking, etc.)

Failure in one Product Manager role doesn't mean that you're not fit to be a PM. You may just need a different set of variables that align better with your strengths.

See more: What It Takes to Become a Great Product Manager

Similarly, a star PM at one venture may have to be ready for massive adjustments when jumping ship to another to prove their mettle. Success doesn't transfer over like university credits. It needs to be earned in every journey you undertake.

Ex: I went through a rough patch back in the early 2010s.

I was struggling to make a significant impact on a web product because of lack of synergy with the remote engineering team.

My manager noticed this & rotated me to a different product line with limited scope, more room for creativity & an on-premise dev team.

Soon enough, my motivation soared & performance took a U-turn there.

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Couple of notes:

1- Don't just apply to any Product Manager job thinking all of them are the same. They're not.

Learn about the products, read Glassdoor reviews, quiz existing employees on culture & ask meaningful questions to HR to uncover how empowered and supported the PM role really is.

2- If you fail at one PM role, then:

a- Self-analyze what you could have done better

b- Imagine an environment (team, product, hierarchy, company stage etc.) which may have suited you better.

It's only if you didn't enjoy the fundamental tenets of product management (like collaboration, design, communication etc.), that you should want to reconsider your career line.