Funny, it was kind of like reading a biography (“my life in PM”)

I kept finding myself nodding my head in a “yup, I’ve had to deal with that too” kind of way

Saeed

I’ll put my 2 cents beside Scott’s in this discussion. Every role has it’s challenges, but combine ill-defined or ill-understood roles like Product Management, along with the need to bring other (not necessarily complaint) teams into alignment, along with a dynamic or competitive market place and that adds up to a difficult task.

This is true for startups as it is for larger companies. Company culture has a lot to do with amount of difficulty involves as much as the personal skills and views of individual product managers.

Company founders, particularly in small but growing companies don’t want to give PMs the freedom and responsibility they need, but still demand the results they want to see.

Like any other role, it can be rewarding and fulfilling or frustrating and draining. Part of our task is to help direct companies to better understanding and implementing a real product management discipline. The benefits is clear. Scalability, optimization and repeatability in the business they are in.

Saeed

Having never worked inside a large company, I can only imagine certain scenarios in those organizations and how they may play out. But as we have discussed before, politics are politics. And trust me, I’ve seen some pretty interesting things play out in very, very small organizations that would rival some of the “most interesting” in bigger organizations, to be sure.

But, playing the big corporate game is something that’s never been my bag. I just love being able to turn to developers and say, “you know, it should probably work like this” an hour or two before pushing out to production