r/ProductManagement

I’d really value honest perspective from people who’ve seen this play out, especially at senior product levels.

I’m a VP of Product at an early-stage company and recently got a mixed review. It wasn’t a PIP or formal warning, but it also didn’t leave me feeling secure. The message was essentially that I’m doing important work, but not consistently operating at the level expected for the role.

More specifically, I was told I’m currently operating more at a Director level than a VP level, and that I need to prove I deserve the VP title.

What makes this harder to interpret is that after the company’s Series A, my compensation was only adjusted to what was framed as a Director-level band, while I’m still expected to carry VP-level ownership. I’m now in a position where I’m being asked to demonstrate that I can meet VP expectations, including bringing milestones to the CEO as proof that I’m getting there.

So from where I sit, it feels like:

- I’m a VP when the company needs VP-level scope and accountability

- I’m compensated more like a Director

- and I’m now being asked to prove I deserve the title I already have

Other context:

- I still have real responsibility and ownership

- leadership is still relying on me for important strategic and cross-functional work

- some of the feedback feels fair and actionable (lead through people, stop absorbing work)

- some of it feels subjective and harder to translate into concrete behavior change (more executive polish, better strategic documentation)

- expectations feel high, but not always consistently defined

- there are enough leadership dynamics involved that I can’t fully tell what is performance gap versus fit, politics, or environment

I’m trying to evaluate this clearly, not emotionally.

My questions:

- Does this sound like a genuinely developmental situation, or does it sound like I’m being managed down?

- Have you seen people recover from this kind of setup at a senior level?

- Is “prove you deserve the title you already hold” ever a real growth path, or is it usually a sign the company is repositioning you without saying so directly?

- What signs would you watch for over the next 30–60 days to tell whether this is salvageable or whether the story is already written?

Appreciate any candid thoughts. This whole situation has made me lose a lot of confidence in myself. It’s odd to be in this punitive position where my comp is being held hostage.

Hello fellow PM's- I just started a PM role at a firm that's building an internal platform tool to better manage their end to end operations. I've stepped in mid-build with one module already live in production.

The challenge I'm facing is that the context handoff is coming from everyone and everywhere. Slack channels, Miro Board brain dumps, a wiki and even the app itself. There's no single "here's what you need to know" document. So, how have you distilled the noise? Where did you start, and how did you figure out what's urgent?

Thank you in advance for sharing.

I started a new role a few months ago (different industry to my previous one) and while I’m delivering and getting good feedback from peers, the management dynamic is doing my head in.

My direct manager is very “hands on” and tends to jump into meetings/threads and speak first or steer decisions, even when I’m across it. I had a calm chat about ownership and they stepped back for a while, but I’m noticing slow regressions again. It’s not always big stuff, but it’s enough that I feel like I’m constantly guarding my lane.

On top of that, my skip-level manager has made comments about wanting to see “more of me and less of my manager” and asked if I’m contributing enough in meetings, which has made me paranoid about optics. I now feel like I’m managing up to two people with different expectations.

I’m honestly exhausted. I’ve never had to work this hard just to be allowed to do my job. I want to learn and grow, but instead I’m spending energy on politics and preventing my manager from taking over.

Has anyone been in a situation like this? Is there a way to reset the dynamic without making it worse? At what point do you accept it’s just a bad fit and move on?

Keen for any perspective, especially if you’ve dealt with a “player-coach” manager who can’t let go.

I’m early in my career and trying to make a smart move toward product long term.

Right now I’m in a niche internal platform role at a large healthcare company. My current work is a mix of configuration and QA/validation, implementing business/client needs into platform logic. It’s stable, but growth has felt slow and I don’t feel like I’m getting meaningfully closer to true product ownership.

I have an internal opportunity for a Data Analyst role supporting a subset of healthcare data tools. From what I’ve learned, the role would involve things like:

•	owning a subset of existing tools

•	data pipeline management / maintenance

•	tool updates, bug fixes, and enhancements

•	some methodology work with a lead + data scientist

•	building new capabilities into the tools over time (potentially)

So it sounds more like data product execution / enhancement / product ops-ish work than pure ad hoc reporting, but it’s still not a PM role.

My long-term goal is to move into something like:

•	Product Manager

•	Product Ops

•	Product Analytics

•	product strategy in health tech

My question for people in product:

Would you view this Data Analyst role as a good bridge into product, or as a support/maintenance lane that could pigeonhole me?

More specifically:

1.	Does this type of role usually help people move closer to product?

2.	Is it more valuable than staying in a niche internal platform/config role if my goal is PM or product-adjacent work?

3.	What signals would tell you this role is actually product-adjacent vs just support with a better title?

4.	If you were hiring for PM/product ops/product analytics later, would this background help or hurt?

Would appreciate blunt advice, especially from people who’ve seen data/tooling roles successfully transition into product.

We run a marketplace with a small team, which include 1 customer service manager and 1 UX designer/researcher. They get feature requests and bug reports from customers, but when they make a ticket it's usually just a screenshot or a copy-pasted quote.

We have a template in GitHub (our current tracker) but it still comes back half-filled out or missing requirements and details. So then we have to do meetings to get enough detail for engineering to actually act on it.

Feels like there has to be a better way. The person closest to the customer shouldn't also need to be technical enough to write a perfect eng ticket. Has anyone solved this handoff cleanly? What's your process?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a Product Manager as a mentor.

I currently work as a Product Designer in fintech, but I regularly step into Product Management responsibilities when my PM is unavailable. I work closely with stakeholders, contribute to product decisions, and think about business impact.

My goal is to become a top-tier Product Manager by 2030 and ship at least one successful product that generates positive revenue.

I'm looking for a mentor who can help me:

• Strengthen product thinking and strategy

• Learn how to ship revenue generating products

• Transition fully into Product Management

• Accelerate my growth and avoid common mistakes

About me:

• Fintech experience

• Product design background

• Already taking on PM responsibilities

• Highly motivated and serious about growth

Even 30 minutes once a month would be incredibly valuable.

If you're open to mentoring or know someone who might be, I'd really appreciate connecting. Thank you so much!!!

For context I’m still somewhat a grad with 2 years experience as a software engineer and 1 years experience as a junior product owner / scrum master both at early level startups.

I studied computer science at uni but ironically towards the end of my degree I realised I really don’t enjoy writing code. However I absolutely loved working as a product owner and scrum master. However once I started doing some research it seems have dedicated SM and agile as a whole has been dying out the past few years.

My end goal in tech is to have a skill where I can work freelance and work a few days a week remotely but obviously with AI and the way things are moving the way tech companies run is probably going to be changing a lot in the next few years and I want to make sure I’m investing time into the right skills. Eg I don’t want to spend the next few years trying to get experience as a agile coach to eventually go freelance and there be no jobs🥲

Does anyone have any opinions on what consulting and freelance jobs might be in more demand in the future?

Thanks in advance!

How do you handle decision logs in practice?

Do you run a weekly check like this:

• one action everyone agrees is next
• two unresolved decisions with owners
• one concrete risk for this week

When those stay unclear, I see roadmap churn and handoff confusion spike fast.

Trying to learn what actually works for teams in the trenches.

I am a Senior Tech Content Writer (which is vastly different from a technical writer role; the word "content" is doing the heavy lifting) with a Master of Arts in English Literature. I have worked in a variety of fields from podcasts to marketing and now I'm in the IT industry. My role here is building and managing the knowledge base in SharePoint (which I designed, laid out the standards, and collaborated with the SMEs to create runbooks, FAQs, and other end user facing deliverables - end users here are internal; I'm in the Operations team). Then, I got a new directive to learn Python, numpy, and pandas to look at end user tickets in ServiceNow, identify documentation gaps and fill it, while trying to discern if documentation is playing a role in reducing tickets (this has been hard to tell as the knowledge base site is fairly new, less than a year where we migrated from a teams site to comma site - in reference to the types of sites on SharePoint - and metrics aren't sufficient to tell.) So I built a package with AI and ran jobs in Jenkins to extract end user questions from our tickets to close the gaps, while creating email and content templates for the teams, found ways to market the site to build foot fall, with a plan in place to further connect with the end users which has been delayed owing to management directives.

Now here's the kicker - I am considering moving internally to product management roles. I have close to 8 years of experience across content and creative roles. However, my work aligns with the fundamentals of product management - collabing with stakeholders, multiple teams, keeping the end user in mind, and so on. Only on the strategy side I may not have as diverse a portfolio. In my current company, there is an opportunity to move to a Product Owner role and also a Product Manager role. At first I was thinking to move to Product Owner to better orient myself with the space and then shift to Product Manager. But the more I researched the space, the more it worried me that I'm narrowing my scope. Product Owners from what I've gathered is a piece in the chess board that is a scrum framework. I'm not sure if I want to work with execution and delivering output alone when strategy is where I'm interested. However, considering my background, I'm wondering how I should sell my experience.

Can you advise?

The design quality of OncaStudy’s main assets is noticeably declining, and update cycles are frequently being delayed. This is not merely an aesthetic issue but a structural sign indicating a rapid reallocation of internal operational resources or a collapse in the management pipeline. In practice, changes in visual quality are often linked to decreased system availability and used as a key metric to preemptively check operational stability. Do you view the decline in a platform's visual finish as significant data for predicting actual changes in service operation policies?

Anybody here who can speak to the experience in Capital One's PDP new grad rotational program (specifically in the Plano location if possible)? How was the program and work after the program? PIP concerns? Day to day in the program? Any other advice you would give?

I am an AI engineer and I am building something that takes PRD as input.

Can you guys provide me a link for some project can be anything that has PRDs defined even in phases or some of your practice docs that are of course non confidential

In return I will happily share my project/product with you