How Stressful Is It To Be A Product Manager at A Tech Company

11/17/2019 (1) How stressful is it to be a product manager at a tech company?
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Saeed Khan, 20 Years of high-tech PM experience and counting

*T&Cs apply
Updated Jul 27, 2018
Being a PM in a tech company is unbelievably stressful. It’s not for the faint of heart.
First, you’ve got to know, understand and assimilate a LOT of information, knowledge Rs 1,921*
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It’s a lot, and of course, you need to be a leader, communicator, analyzer, negotiator,
teacher and enabler.
Second, you’re doing everyone else’s jobs — at least all the parts everyone else don’t
want to do, which means all the crappiest, thankless parts.
Third, everyone blames you for everything, even when it’s not your fault.
If the product is successful, sales and marketing get all the credit (and all the
commissions and bonuses and trips to President’s Club etc.)
If the product fails, then everyone points their collective fingers at YOU asking YOU
what more YOU could have done to make it better. They turn their backs on you
faster than the cast of House of Cards did to Kevin Spacey.
Are you considering becoming a Product Manager? If so, go into sales. You’ll make
more money, get better bonuses, and have a far longer career than in Product
Management.
OK…if you’ve read this far, thank you. And let me say, that the above, while
somewhat exaggerated is true in some companies. It is stressful, but not always
because of all the downside aspects.
In many companies Product Management is stressful, but with a lot of upside which
includes a lot of autonomy and authority, the opportunity to learn and create, and
make a real impact on the company you work in.
So either way, yes, it’s stressful, but also can be quite rewarding in the right
companies.
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Keith Dole
Often its the rotten share of people that gets into product management that calls its a str…
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Brett Fox, Fmr CEO @ Touchstone Semiconductor

Answered Aug 13, 2018
Back in the day, when I was recruiting product managers for the various businesses I
was running I used to describe the job as, “running a company inside of a company.”
What an incredible opportunity you have. You get to run a business!
Yes, being a product manager at a tech company is stressful. But, being a product
manager at the right tech company can be a great learning experience.
So let’s say that you’re working at the right tech company. Here’s what you can
expect (and yes it will likely be very, very stressful):
A. You get to run a business at micro level
To me this is the coolest part of being a product manager. Approach it like the
product line you are responsible for is your business.
Even if you don’t have full P&L responsibility. Even if you don’t have all the functions
responsible reporting to you (you likely will not). Approach the job like it’s your
business.
Your role is an incredible proving ground for starting a company or being a CEO later
in your career. Why? Because you are doing, at a micro-level, many of the same
things a CEO does. Now that’s cool!
B. You may get P&L responsibility
As you progress in your product management career, you will move towards having
P&L responsibility. Again, this is great training for running a company because
managing a P&L is part of the job of the CEO.
Yes, it’s stressful owning the numbers, but it’s a lot less stressful than when you
become a CEO.
C. You will be interacting with all the functional elements of your company
I’ve seen product managers come from many different disciplines in my career.
Maybe you’ve been an engineer. Or maybe you were in marketing. Perhaps your
background is sales.
Now you get to work with every area of the company. You will learn how finance
operates. You will learn how manufacturing operates. You will learn how sales
operates.
The challenge is most of these organizations, especially at the start of your product
management career, will report into you on a dotted line basis. That means you will
be competing for influence versus the other groups vying for their time.
Yet again, this is great training for being a CEO. Good CEOs realize that you can’t just
dictate to your team what they should do (you can but this becomes
counterproductive over time). Learning how to influence people is a critical CEO skill.
D. You’ll be the point person for customer interaction
Congratulations, you’re running a product line. And congratulations because now

customers are going to point to you to solve their every problem.
This is more great training for being a CEO because you’ll quickly learn the value of
great customer service.
E. You’ll be responsible
1 for hitting your revenue and profitability1numbers
The reason you were put in charge of this business was to grow the revenue and
profitability of the business. Now does this sound like something a CEO might be
responsible for?
You bet.
The challenge and the pressure comes from the fact that your boss and the CEO are
counting on you to meet or beat your numbers. The initial reaction many people
have is to sandbag their numbers.
Don’t do it. Instead set realistic numbers and beat them.
F. You’ll likely interact with, and get coaching from, the CEO and Executive
Management
Now the good news is you’re going to interact a lot with executive management.
You’re running a business, after all, and management is going to want to hear from
you.
The bad news (if you want to look at it that way) is that the bar has gone up, way up.
Management is expecting you to perform at a high level.
Succeed, and you’ll be moving up the chain to bigger and bigger product
management roles, including general management roles. Fail, and you may be shown
the door.
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Zachary Thomas
I feel like a lot of this might apply more to someone with the title “GM” and not “product …
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Omar Eduardo Fernández, Product Manager at Google (2017-present)

Updated Jul 23, 2018
It is the most stressful work I’ve done other than graduating from MIT for undergrad.
After my MIT graduation I went into consulting. I thought it was an interesting and
sometimes challenging job, some stress here and there, but nothing compared to the
stress of attending MIT. Sometimes I may need to work every awaken hour for 6
weeks in a row, but I knew the work was going to be done and I’d do a damn good
job.
I then worked in Customer Success at a startup. Similar experience. Some crunch

times here and there, but manageable. If I worked smart and longer hours here and
there, I felt confident in my work and was happy with things.
Working as a Product Manager was a whole different animal. Here are the few
reasons I can come up with:
Unclear expectations: most Product Managers are expected to figure things

out, which is fine, but often you have to do so with little to no
data/research, lots of uncertainty, and are being judged by everyone else in
the company.
Opinions galore:1it’s easy to look at a product and say “this sucks,1 they
should have done this better.” All of your friends probably do that all the
time. When you’re the PM, everyone is telling you that, giving you all the
helpful feedback they have, without realizing the countless tradeoffs and
challenges that were necessary to get the current version of the product
out.
In your eyes, the product will always feel incomplete: as a PM you are
constantly looking at the product of your work, the product, and seeing all
the ways in which it could be better. The good days of feeling very proud of
how polished everything is are hard to come by.
You’re NOT the CEO of your product: a CEO hires and fires people. A CEO
has the authority to restructure the organization to make it work how he or
she wishes. A product manager has no direct reports (usually) and needs to
lead through influence at all times. It is challenging.
Other teams expect you to fix their problems: the sales team will hear from
prospects about something that’s missing in the feature, or something that
sucks, and they will expect you to fix it. Customer success will hear from
100s of customers complaining about what’s not working. The design team
will tell you all the ways in which the product feels Frankesteinian, like 10
pieces of shit got randomly linked together, and why you need to redo the
full user experience. All of these will look to you and say… “when are you
fixing this.”
In the end, it boils down to this. While in every other job I had I could satisfy
everyone if I worked harder and scoped down the problem, as a Product
Manager I will always disappoint colleagues and customers I care a lot about.
I will need to de-prioritize features or fixes that my teammates or customers are

eagerly waiting for. Or that enhancement that would make everyone’s life so much
better. Making these tradeoffs day after day, and learning to still be proud of the
work you and the team are doing, is a very difficult thing to do and a source of
constant stress.
Hint: a lot of meditation and soul searching helps cope with this.
Update: wow, I’m so grateful for all the comments and reactions to this answer. It is
clear to me that there are many out there with all the feels. :)
I wrote an article on managing this PM-related stress as a follow-up to this answer.

I hope you find it helpful. I must say that I love the PM job, but some good stress-
management practices are crucial to thrive.
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Silas Matteson
All of your observations are essentially correct. However, my experience is these “stress p…
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Related Questions
What does it take to be a good product manager at a start up?
Why are non techinical product managers so bad at their jobs and how can I deal with
them?
Greg Hartrell, Product Leader @ Google

Short answer: It depends on your mindset and your ability to handle complexity.
If you struggle with managing
1 complexity in general, you will find product
1
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management in a large tech company stressful. Products at these organizations willQuora Add Question
have more complexity to launch and grow because your product stands to reach
millions (and sometimes billions) of people.
Complexity comes up in a variety of contexts:
The technology might be straight from research or cutting edge and prone
to quality issues that aren't detectable until you achieve mass scale.
User needs can span a large swath of segments and demographics, and you
don't get the luxury of ignoring them.
For established products, each product update often requires incremental

and measured steps to get it right. (Or you risk downtime or mass user
impact)
The business model might be ground breaking or immediately attract the

attention of your competitors.
The people around you are disproportionately all accomplished and super
smart, and thereby have more insights and high quality opinions for you to
navigate.
Launching something completely new attracts extreme industry and press

attention, and it can be harder to pitch something bold and new for
resources
That said, if you enjoy organizing/motivating groups of humans, routinely advocating

for your position and revel in making decisions to unblock your team & move things
forward, then it's an invigorating experience and only occasionally stressful.
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Jose Reyes, Entrepreneur

Originally Answered: How stressful is it to be a product manager at a tech company?

Like any job, it’s stressful when you don’t know what you’re doing. And not too
stressful when you do.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot more likely find a PM in the former category, than the latter.
Unlike most other careers, there is almost no education for becoming a PM. PMs
come from all sorts of background from computer science, to customer service, to
business management, analytics, etc. And no matter how much experience you have
there’s a good chance there will be an area – or more likely, many areas – of PMing
that will be foreign for at least a year, but more likely 3 years for most PMs.
I believe Product Management is the hardest job in tech. Harder than any C-level job,
including CEO.
PMs have to be innovative, technical, creative, personable, inspirational, trustworthy,

transparent, efficient and consistent communicators, open-minded, analytical all
while being fast and efficient. They have to be able to switch context without slowing
them down from a meeting with an engineer talking architecture to answering a
customer question or feature request to discussing prioritization decisions with
important and valuable teammates who disagree vehemently. On average, well-
entrenched PMs are switching context and going deep on a subject about 6 - 8 times
a day.
And like I said there’s no job or education in the world that prepares you for this. The
closest job I can think of is that of a US Senator. Somehow you have to make
decisions that make a large majority of people happy, make sure you’re being
transparent along the way by explaining what your research shows (even when
nobody wants to pay attention to the details). You’re also expected to be creative
with your solutions and if anything goes wrong it’s probably your fault and you have
to solve all these problems all at once. More importantly, the feedback cycle for the
effectiveness of your decisions is usually pretty slow, it takes months and sometimes
years to find out if your decision was right. And remember nobody is going to give
you any more resources
1 and they actually want you to somehow reduce 1 cost, thank
you very much.
But when you’ve got some experience, and you’ve invested time and energy into the
areas where your skillset is lacking. It becomes a lot easier and lot less stressful :)
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Kushaan Shah, Product Manager

Answered Nov 30, 2018
“As a product manager, you are part psychologist, scientist, and artist – and the
master of none of these.”
Disclaimer: This is a worst case scenario (not speaking from experience) but one that
could definitely fall in the lap of a Product Manager.
Imagine this: Several of your users have a frustration with the product you’re building
- you root down the problem they’re having and get ready to do interviews and get
more context. Most of the users confirm that they’re having the problem. No one has
a perfect solution. The one user with a solution dreams up a solution that is beyond
the wildest dreams of technical feasibility. You note it down but ultimately ignore
him. That’s ok - you can confirm with management that there is value in solving the
problem. You begin to scope out what an ideal workflow looks like - the design team
takes the workflow and builds something beautiful. You bring it to development and
find out that half the design likely won’t work unless the scope is blown up by two
months. You go back to the drawing board and start doing more competitor research
on what other software is doing to solve the problem when all of a sudden you get
news that a competitor has released something brand new related to a completely
different problem - unless you solve that problem first, you’re going to fall behind in
the market. You abandon your first problem, to the ire of those users and begin
solving the second problem by talking to the sales and marketing teams, who
mention the requirements that are essential. You bring those requirements o
engineering and they flag it will take three months to build. You get told it needs to
be built in two weeks. You strip out as much as you can from the scope, ship it and
then go back to the first problem you were solving. Unfortunately, now that the
scope-stripped feature has been shipped, users are clamoring for more. Your
competitor hears them and starts building up their software. Unfortunately, you have
to wait until you get time again to build it up again and the feature goes into the
backlog, on top of other features requests from angry users that will message you
atleast once a month trying to figure out when their problems will be answered.
You never know what you’re going to get.

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Andrew Franklin, B.A. Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley

Answered Jul 10, 2018
If you read one of the conventional career guides or take an entry-level product
management class, they will tell you how wonderful, important and valuable product
management is.
But, I want to warn you that product management is a very political job. And it's very
easy for your job to be marginalized by other groups in the company.
I've met many stressed-out, frustrated, and cranky product managers although
product management is supposed to be their "dream career". If you randomly pick
ten product managers, I would guess at least 5 of them are somewhat unhappy.
The main challenge is:
In most cross-functional product team environment, product managers don't directly

manage anyone, but they are responsible for almost everything.
For example, when I 1was managing the CRM product, I had the following
1 team
members on my cross functional team who don’t report to me:
Program manager. He reported to the Manager of Software Development.

His job was to manage the project plan for delivering my product.
Sales engineer. She was a sales engineer who reported to the regional VP of
sales. Once the product was ready for sales, she would be the first person to
get trained. She was responsible to train her team members.
Software developers: there were five developers on the team. They all
reported to the Senior Manager of Software Development.
User Interface designer: She developed the mock-ups and designed the
user interface for the application. She reported to the Director of User
Experience.
QA engineers: Three QA engineers were responsible for thoroughly testing

the product. They reported to QA Manager.
Implementation consultant: we had one implementation consultant on the

team. Once a customer purchased the product, the implementation
consultant would help the client to install and customize the application.
The implementation consultant reported to Director of Professional
Services.
As you see, the product manager didn't directly manage any member of the cross-
functional team. But, he needed to motivate them and get things done. The product
manager must be able to influence people, resolve conflict, and lead.
Furthermore, given the cross functional nature of the product manager job, the
product manager could be easily distracted, and pulled to many different directions.
However, if you have the political skills and emotional intelligence to handle the
interpersonal conflicts and politics, product management can be a great career for
you. Product Managers are the quarterback of the products they manage. A high
percentage of Silicon Valley CEOs have worked as Product Manager at one point in
their careers. Product Management is not for everyone. Set the right expectation.
Know what you are getting yourself into. You’ll be able to manage the stress much
better, and have a more fulfilling career.
Andrew Franklin
Author: Smart Move: How to become a Product Manager

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JL, Product Manager

Sometimes it is stressful. Being on the job for a while you learn a lot about
stakeholder management. This part is most probably the most stressful part as well if
people management is not your strenght.
When i started as a Product Manager, i thought i would be graded on my knowledge

and the success of the products that i deliver. However, these are just 2 factors in a
bunch. I found that the main factor of your product success lies in your stakeholder
management skills.
Getting people to be an internal ambassador of the product you want to create is the
hardest part of the job. A lot of peop...(more)
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Vlad Grubman, Creating and managing products for 7 years now

Thanks for A2A. The 1question is “How stressful is it to be a product manager
1 at a tech
company?”
Well… it is as stressful as you allow it to be.
First, being a product manager (in a true sense of the word) is an amazing
experience. For as long as I’ve been doing this I feel like every day is a new adventure
town . Citizens may like you, may dislike you or even may try to burn you for fun.
You never know. Still, it’s a very entertaining and positive incentive to work as a
product manager. New treasures uncovered! New secrets revealed! New monsters
captured and tamed!
Now, about those stressful n...(more)
Upvote · 2 Share
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO of Product School - San Francisco,

Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and New York
Updated Nov 23, 2018
Omar Eduardo Fernández has written a fantastic answer summarizing why the PM
role can be stressful. It’s not always easy to overcome this stress, but to do so
requires a clear set of values. If you know you are doing your best work according to
a consistent set of values, then you will be more resilient to stress and the associated
anxiety.
Here are some notes from a speech Jourdan Mission, a Multi-Platform Coordinator at
FX Networks, gave at Product School on some of the key values it’s important to
have to survive and thrive the highly competitive PM life:
Transparency. Everything is a conv...
(more)
Upvote · 36 Share
Joanna Weber, Founder at Follow Me Post

Observations of working in a tech department at a non-tech company:
Not stressful
Decision-making is shared, but PO makes the final call (for consensus, not
clusterf***)
Communications are good, making good use of tools (Jira, HipChat, Skype,
etc), even when teams are located remotely or working from home -
including technical and non-technical people being able to easily explain
things to each other
Everyone respects (and likes) each other
Expectations are clear
Shared values including a shared understanding of what ‘done’ will look like
Stressful
The only person who has access to the CEO won’t as...
(more)
Upvote · 2 Share
1 1
Related Questions
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11/17/2019 (1) How stressful is it to be a product manager at a tech company?

Product Managers Technology Companies Product Management Related Questions

How stressful is it to be a product manager at a tech Why is product management important?

What does it take to be a good product manager

Saeed Khan, 20 Years of high-tech PM experience and counting

Sponsored by Jira Software, Atlassian

Brett Fox, Fmr CEO @ Touchstone Semiconductor

What an incredible opportunity you have. You get to run a business!

A. You get to run a business at micro level

B. You may get P&L responsibility

D. You’ll be the point person for customer interaction

Congratulations, you’re running a product line. And congratulations because now

Don’t do it. Instead set realistic numbers and beat them.

Related Spaces (More Answers Below)

Discover More Spaces

Omar Eduardo Fernández, Product Manager at Google (2017-present)

I then worked in Customer Success at a startup. Similar experience. Some crunch

Unclear expectations: most Product Managers are expected to figure things

I will need to de-prioritize features or fixes that my teammates or customers are

I wrote an article on managing this PM-related stress as a follow-up to this answer.

Upvote · 404 Share · 10

1 more comment from David Holman

What does it take to be a good product manager at a start up?

When should the product manager quit?

Greg Hartrell, Product Leader @ Google

Complexity comes up in a variety of contexts:

For established products, each product update often requires incremental

The business model might be ground breaking or immediately attract the

Launching something completely new attracts extreme industry and press

That said, if you enjoy organizing/motivating groups of humans, routinely advocating

Add a comment... Recommended All

Jose Reyes, Entrepreneur

Originally Answered: How stressful is it to be a product manager at a tech company?

PMs have to be innovative, technical, creative, personable, inspirational, trustworthy,

Add a comment... Recommended All

Kushaan Shah, Product Manager

You never know what you’re going to get.

Add a comment... Recommended All

Andrew Franklin, B.A. Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley

The main challenge is:

In most cross-functional product team environment, product managers don't directly

Program manager. He reported to the Manager of Software Development.

QA engineers: Three QA engineers were responsible for thoroughly testing

Implementation consultant: we had one implementation consultant on the

Author: Smart Move: How to become a Product Manager

Add a comment... Recommended All

JL, Product Manager

When i started as a Product Manager, i thought i would be graded on my knowledge

Add a comment... Recommended All

Vlad Grubman, Creating and managing products for 7 years now

Well… it is as stressful as you allow it to be.

Now, about those stressful n...(more)

Add a comment... Recommended All

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO of Product School - San Francisco,

Transparency. Everything is a conv...

Add a comment... Recommended All

Joanna Weber, Founder at Follow Me Post

Observations of working in a tech department at a non-tech company:

Everyone respects (and likes) each other

Expectations are clear

Add a comment... Recommended All

Why is product management important?

Do product managers get fired from big tech companies?