“No one tells you this before you become a PM:

The hardest part of product management isn't building features or great products.

It's the people.

Even if your strategy is clear, your roadmap tidy, and your team works in almost perfect conditions - one thing remains:

You spend most of your time managing expectations, translating between worlds, calming politics.

Stakeholder management isn't a "soft skill."

It is product work.

Without alignment, even the best strategy will rot.

I've seen PMs feel guilty because they're "not building."

But sometimes, aligning humans is building — it's creating the conditions for the product to survive, or even better, to thrive.” - Stephanie Leue

Here's a hack I use to dealing with stakeholders coming with solutions, rather than problems.

Don't try to work backwards, work forward.

I love product newsletters! I really got to see what good looks like several years ago while working at a globally distributed company. We had offices and product teams all around the world. Every month, we would send out an internal newsletter to the whole organization, giving an update on what each product team was working on.

I regularly see Product Managers and teams face friction when it comes to navigating the boundaries between different roles.

Either it’s the introduction of new roles, like Product Marketing Managers, Growth Product Managers, etc where Product Managers suddenly find themselves confused…