Team Members: Roland Martinez Luna, Yuvna Gupta, Riya Shankaran, Joshua Tikare
Norms:
- Everyone specifies how they would like to receive feedback
- Let the team know as early as you can if you are going to be more than 5 minutes late
- Communicate progress on your task, and reach out if you feel as though you need help
- Balancing the workload as even as possible across the team
- Team members should accommodate for other teammates emergencies/extenuating circumstances when necessary
- Once a decision is reached as a team, everyone is on board there onwards
New questions:
- Describe an average day
- Describe a good day
- Describe a bad day
- What tools do you use at work?
- What’s your favourite tool that you use at work?
- What’s your least favourite tool at work?
- How much money is spent on tooling for a PM at work?
- What problems have you had in the last month at work?
- Recall a time you had a communication breakdown/failure – what happened?
- What part of your day-to-day job excites you most?
- How have you adopted AI into your work and what are some ways it influenced the way you work?
Affinity Map:
Organizational barriers and red tape
- You can’t do a weeklong sprint at a hardware company because there are retailers and supply chains involved, which extends the timeline
- Corporate politics is a bigger issue in hardware companies because there’s no longer the data transparency of CRM
- Politics and gatekeeping make it difficult to inspect the evidence behind priorities
- Software companies are more agile and lean, whereas hardware companies are more hierarchical, which is counterproductive because PMs should have the ability to experiment
- A major issue the PM faced was getting permissions for various tools, he said that it was unclear who the responsible person was and he would wait weeks for permissions
- Was restricted to the internal tooling that the company allowed for
Communication barriers
- “Finding time with managers is already quite difficult.”
- Getting people to read and respond to important communications is not straightforward
- Remote meetings make it difficult for PMs to communicate visual ideas and actively participate in design discussions.
- Turning thoughts into useful communication has to happen between meetings
- PMs must communicate progress to senior leadership, but synthesizing information from many initiatives into a coherent story is difficult.
Coordination
- Work across engineering, design and UX was largely sequential
- Roles and responsibilities were not clearly defined
- Time zone gaps between US and UK made it hard to get priority tasks off the backlog
- Jira hygiene for engineers was a major issue and the solution was suboptimal (a Jira wrapper). People in the company disagreed on whether or not to use the solution
- Preventing tasks from falling through the cracks
Repetitive work
- Existing user research is scattered or poorly documented, so teams repeat studies and questions
- User studies are very repetitive (e.g. conduct a user study on app, then do the same study again in 6 months), but could be conducted in a more efficient way since they ask the same questions over and over again
- PMs struggle to understand the status of multiple initiatives because information is scattered across Jira, Asana, engineering conversations, and other tools.
- Asana or Jira can’t get accurate status updates with the whole picture of how a problem was solved and how it impact your product roadmap that is needed when reporting to leadership, so it’s tedious to gather all those updates manually and break the focus/ annoy of engineers
- Doesn’t like emails, some people use it as a historical repository, but they really shouldn’t
Understanding users and product performance
- Your analysis tool not telling you why poor metrics are happening
- Disliked the tedium of replaying live sessions and understanding what went wrong or why a trade did not go through
- Click metrics were taken into account after the product spec was made because the teams were independent
- “We need these metrics for our job.” Engineers “kept kicking it down the line.”
- Customer research to know whether it’s the right product or not (now solved with GenAI)
Prioritization
- Prioritization of tasks from leadership was unclear
- Prioritization requires negotiating conflicting engineering, finance, and user needs
- As a PM, you have lots of cool ideas, but if someone in charge tells you they need to keep margins above a certain percentage and your new feature would drag it down, then you have to get rid of your new features. Because of this, PMs have to do lots of negotiation
- Preparing evidence to defend product decisions to leadership
- Deciding whether to fix, pivot, or kill a product
Timeline and budget constraints
- You can’t do a weeklong sprint at a hardware company because there are retailers and supply chains involved, which extends the timeline
- You have to launch a product to the entire globe before the attention tapers off
- Knowing what financial quarter of the year to release your product
- PMs may have a good product idea but miss the window when leadership allocates budgets.
- Balancing end of year slowness due to resources being used up and getting ready for the start of year when the budget is allocated
AI Comparison:
AI comparison reflection: AI caught the problem that “politics and gatekeeping make it difficult to inspect the evidence behind priorities.” I noticed that the PM kept repeating the issue of corporate politics, but it was hard for me to articulate how it affects her work, so I think AI did a good job of that. However, it flattened a lot of her more complex points into generic sentences. For example, one of the problems I pulled out was that user studies are repetitive, and I provided an example of what she meant by that. AI summarized the point without providing the details about why it matters. Since AI’s points were short and high-level, it didn’t assert anything that isn’t in the transcripts.
Long List of Problems:
- Organizational barriers and red tape
- Yuvna Interview 2, Yuvna Interview 3, Riya Interview 2, Joshua Interview 1, Joshua Interview 2
- “Permissions were annoying… the permissions systems right now is really messed up because nobody really knows who to ask… For approval, it was, like, weeks… it was ridiculous.”
- Communication barriers
- Roland Interview 2, Yuvna Interview 3, Yuvna Interview 1, Riya Interview 3, Joshua Interview 1, Joshua Interview 2
- “When there is no clear ownership… communication breakdown… if that [RACI matrix] is not put in place, there could be a communication breakdown.”
- Coordination
- Roland Interview 1, Roland Interview 2, Yuvna Interview 3, Joshua Interview 1, Joshua Interview 2
- “Getting the status updates and everything is pretty tricky, and also giving a cohesive narrative to your CXO.”
- Repetitive work
- Yuvna Interview 3, Riya Interview 2, Yuvna Interview 2
- “I’d have to watch the session and, like, watch, like, click the buttons… that was, like, very tedious and menial… sometimes I have to do that for, like, 40 different bankers.”
- Understanding users and product performance
- Roland Interview 1, Riya Interview 2, Yuvna Interview 3, Riya Interview 3, Joshua Interview 1, Joshua Interview 2
- There’s no click metrics… this is literally how we can tell if the product’s performing well or not.”
- Prioritization
- Riya Interview 2, Yuvna Interview 1, Roland Interview 1, Joshua Interview 1, Joshua Interview 2
- “You have to understand what kind of features you want to build, and this is something like setting priorities is a big, big, big, big topic for a product manager.”
- Timeline constraints
- Yuvna Interview 2, Riya Interview 2, Roland Interview 1, Joshua Interview 1, Joshua Interview 2
- “If somebody did not complete the task, that they should have completed by this afternoon, how does it impact my go-to-market launch?”
- Budget constraints
- Roland Interview 1, Riya Interview 2, Joshua Interview 1, Joshua Interview 2
- “In the end of the day, someone just decides, oh no… our margins is at, I don’t know, 70%, and then you have to get rid of so many cool features.”
TAM:
PM Calculation:
342.9 million in US * 59.2% of US in workforce * 5.8% of workforce employed in tech * 3.0% of tech workers are program managers
342.6 million * .591 * .058 * .030 = .35 million
Sources:
US population: https://www.census.gov/popclock/
US workforce: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.htm
US tech workforce: https://www.comptia.org/en-us/blog/state-of-the-tech-workforce-2026-trends-job-growth-and-future-opportunities/
US PM workforce: https://medium.com/@mikldd/data-and-product-to-engineer-ratio-at-50-tech-scaleups-21a38dfb3200
Spent on Tooling for Them:
$100/PM/month * 12 months/year = $1200/PM/year
Source: Listed per seat enterprise cost for PM-specific SaaS tools including Jira, Confluence, Asana, Productboard, Notion, Figma
TAM Conclusion:
350K PMs * $1200/PM/year = $420M/year
Interview Rounds Comparison:
In this second round of interviews, we gained more insight into PM pain points. We were able to garner a lot more detail about their various experiences – the anecdotes of specific products, clients and companies they worked with added a level deeper to our understanding beyond some of the high-level answers we received in the first round. We also got insight into a broad range of PM experiences (startup, Big Tech company, non-tech company, Fortune 100, mid-sized companies etc.). This really adds colour to our understanding of the PM role beyond Big Tech.
Concept from the readings:
We utilisesd Torres’ concept of using anecdotes and real-life examples as the guide for our interviews. We felt that this helped us to better understand the role individually and it is also much easier for the interviewee to answer as they are complete experts in their lived experiences and are thus comfortable answering and elaborating on any questions. We asked interviewees “Describe an average day”. “Describe a bad day” or “Describe a good day” to get varied answers and learn more about what things constitute good, bad and average for these PMs.
