Over the past few months, Ashley Degianelli’s LinkedIn series, “Why People Are Leaving Product” has been blowing up my feed.
The topic comes up often for me and in an attempt to reference all of her amazing opinions, I asked her if I could share them in one place.
Her opinions and questions are not limited to LinkedIn.
They creep into my slack channels, get whispered to me at networking events.
Product people are questioning a lot.
I’m excited to share Ashley’s ideas on the topic below…
Ashley’s Initial Observation
Almost every product person I talk to recently is just about ready to exit product. For good.
Great product people. People who were once incredibly passionate about solving problems through technology. People who know how to build award winning experiences.
I think there's a number of reasons for this and they aren't just based on the current market since even people with jobs are looking for an exit from tech.
I'll be exploring this more this week and next so let me know what you think is contributing down below.
Link out to check out the 141 comments.
She goes on to hypothesize, poll and dig into what’s really going on. I loved all of these ideas, the conversations she sparked and I wanted to reference them in one place. So below is a series of her thinking around the Product Role distilled down to 10 of my favorite observations.
Reason 1: Increased Scope Leads to burnout
Let's start with a big symptom first: Increased scope which can easily lead to burnout if not carefully managed.
Most commonly post a layoff, reduction in staff can often mean PMs covering what was once managed by 2 or 3 or more PMs.
Personally, this happened to me at more than one organization. Sadly aside from the most recent instance the only correction was made by my exit.
I know I'm not alone - I've spoken to many product people who were asked to take on multiple teams which leads to: multiple ceremonies and projects to juggle.
It becomes a point of frustration when leadership is at best apathetic to the pressure it puts you under as a PM. You have the same expectations of delivering results but now across multiple products and initiatives at the same time.
I'd love to hear more from folks who have experienced this and what the end result was. Mine is in the comments below (generalized as I think it's an industry problem).
Link out to comments.
Reason 2: Feature Factory Norms
Symptom: Feature factory + lack of autonomy is the norm for product.
I think the core of this problem can actually be different depending on the organization but what I see most often was beautifully summed up by Tara Goldman in a comment on another post. "The playbook isn’t working. Those who realize that sooner and/or make it clear what the north star is alongside a stupid simple and clear vision and strategy + give teams the space (and right sized scope) to produce results will succeed."
The playbook of PMs build what executives say, often without data or insights to back it up leads to poor performance which leads to more oversight and demands of what to build from executives. It's a vicious cycle.
Great products take time and research to build. This requires failure, iteration and the space to redefine a product. It requires investment in the product without a guarantee of success.
I know some folks will say PMs NEED to push back and create that space, but that requires leadership who are willing to listen and take risks.
Link out to 25 comments.
Reason 3: Burnout
Symptom: Burnout (emotional, physical and mental exhaustion) that begins to impact other areas of your life.
Burnout I believe happens due to chronic stress that goes unchecked. For PMs this can look like: pressure to deliver/perform, accountability on projects they didn't agree with greenlighting anyway/ being held responsible for poor business decisions that they had no say in.
I agree that a lot of burnout can be eased by:
1. Soul/Spirit goals: If work is no longer fulfilling you, turning inward to understand what you desire and how to get it is key. This may be leaning into your faith, developing faith, developing mindfulness, new practices like mediation.2. Activity: Pick something you enjoy doing that gives you that great feeling post activity of "I can do anything". It'll heal you in ways that can't be overestimated.
3. Make time to stay connected to friends/family. Set up time in advance. When you're burnt out reaching out is really hard. Set it up in your calendar and reach out. It makes a world of difference to stay in touch with your people.
4. Hard boundaries. As PMs we are especially victim to Meetings that Could be an Email syndrome. I had a colleague who was a masterclass in saying no to calls, projects, meetings that didn't serve him or his team and their goals. . For those of us less naturally blessed in the say no department: Take your lunch break, block that time every day M-F. Do not respond to slack outside of work hours (unless you are on call and it's outlined as a rotation), delete slack from your phone on the weekends. Whatever you need to do to make sure you actually get the downtime you need and create separation between work and personal life.
Every quarter /half a year remove all recurring 1:1 meetings aside from manager/direct reports on you calendar. See what you need at this point. You'll be amazed.
Burnout likely means you've given more than you've gotten and now you're feeling the side effects of it. You can heal in the same organization as I don't think most organizations cause burnout - our responses to the environment does. Sometimes you do that healing and you realize the next opportunity for you lies elsewhere, go to it with the lessons learned to not repeat the burnout cycle.
Reason 4: Dissatisfaction
Symptom: Dissatisfaction in product roles... because of deli-ordering (thanks 🔥 Chauncey Nartey, SHRM-SCP), agile is dead myth (Isaac Nelson), lack of clear career progression, relationship management to prove value
I think about 5% of organizations are product-led. For product professionals these companies operate in the north-star of product roles.
For the other 95% of organizations - product is either fighting against multiple forces to prove there is a better way to work, has resigned to waterfall style delivery and/or stakeholders decide the roadmap and PMs need to lead through "influence". Most often its some blend of we have to work this way and work to prove why it should be changed at the same time.
🔥 🔥 🔥 Influence works but PMs should be accountable/responsible for their roadmaps, otherwise they can't be accountable/responsible for the outcomes or lack of outcomes. 🔥 🔥 🔥
If this isn't true and PMs are held accountable for work they didn't put forward... they are just organizational scapegoats.
Link out to 73 comments!
Reason 5: Growing Cynical
Symptom: Growing cynical. (Think of the PM who is unwilling to put forward ideas, doesn't believe positive change is likely, limits risks the team takes out of fear and not based on data or insights).
Louis Huard detailed this beautifully in a comment on another post (I'll share his comment again in the comments). The TL;DR though is that product is the easy scapegoat in the room for all the pain points and disagreements that exist within an organization. I believe this is because as we lack clear boundaries around what product is and is not responsible for - every organization seems to define this for themselves.
At worst, product managers end up as targets for negative energy and hardly ever recognized for their success. Their successes are team successes but the failures are theirs and theirs alone.
🙋♀️ I've seen it happen first hand. I've been fortunate to see amazing leaders create space for PMs to be recognized for successes and shielded from scapegoating. I don't know how common it is though in an environment that allows for it in the first place as it requires servant leadership.
Too often product is seen as "other" within an organization when ideally product should be central to the organization. This disconnect ends up falling heavily on the shoulders of PMs who have to figure out how to navigate it without it leading them to cynicism.
Link to 26 comments.
Reason 6: Lack of Innovation
One is part symptom and part cause: lack of innovation.
We all know what real innovation looks like: it's the iPod when people were happy with the Walkman. It's the car when people were happy with horses and trains. It's taking something people aren't sure they need but recognizing the existing shortcomings and filling those needs so entirely as to become ubiquitous.
We also are all aware of pretty big innovation flops: Google Glasses anyone?
We also are seeing less and less innovative products hit the market. Does this mean innovation is dead? Hardly. As humans, we are always looking to improve and make our own lives simpler. Personally I'm still waiting for a personal robot a la Rosie from the Jetsons, efficient and sassy.
So what's the give? Innovation from product and technology teams is incredibly expensive. Not only do you have to put humans on innovation, they need to do research, they need space to fail, it takes time to really build up a brand new innovative product to get wide market adoption. You have to invest people, monetary resources and of course, consider the opportunity costs of having those people on something hypothetical versus something that will give you improvement now.
Granted my experience professionally is only post the 2008 financial crisis which really lasted until 2011/2012 and even then it felt like we were just beginning to recover. It seems to me as an IC and later on in more team leader roles that businesses expect constant revenue generation improvements - a focus on growth being continuous. Which economically just isn't possible or sustainable - what goes up, must also come down and businesses used to prepare for that eventuality now just cut headcount first.
It seems more and more prevalent that instead of innovation investments being viewed as ways to continue to build up and create a strong differentiator, they are now seen as a last resort that are held off until there is no other option. And so we have feature factory product teams in response to this unwillingness to take risks - if we can just keep adding more, there must be more value for our customers.
Link to post.
Reason 7: Lack of compensation & Recognition
Symptom: Lack of being compensated and recognized for wins but quickly/swiftly penalized for losses.
I would like to compare this to a sales organization - they have high stress, and pressure to deliver. A great salesperson (I've been blessed to work with quite a few over the years) is invaluable to the organization. They generate much more revenue than they get paid despite having performance bonuses, commissions and potentially additional incentives to keep them selling and earning for the org.
We would never recommend too much of a cap on sales commissions - what would incentivize them to keep selling?
For product, the real value product managers bring to the table is a part art/ part science blend of creativity, strategy, data analysis partnered with strong communication skills. We're doers AND dreamers.
When we take those talents, and stifle them to become task managers, and yes people instead of product managers - we've just capped our product org in the way we never would a functioning sales org. It's not an easy role, wins are quickly forgotten and losses long remembered and Godspeed if you have too many losses in a row. This means over time, you stop seeing your impact as your own in product - because we're often left off the shout outs and hardly ever see our efforts called out explicitly.
This makes the impact you have as a PM hard to retain and focus on. You're only ever as valuable as the last big win you delivered regardless of other forces at play within an organization. Even as a growth PM where some losses should be normalized and planned for - there's an increasing expectation to always have a winning A/B test that proves your hypothesis. When I first started in growth I was told, you'll fail more than you'll succeed and that means we're testing enough and taking enough risks. I could hold onto a winning A/B test that really did well and improved the experience for our members and our bottom line for months, that's just not the case anymore.
Link to post.
Pause for a poll
Reason 8: Unrealistic expectations
Symptom: Unrealistic expectations from Executives and leadership.
Facts: McKinsey found 80% of product launches fail to meet targets, yet the perfection pressure persists. (thanks Sam Vernaza, CSPO for sharing this in a different post!)
The IC truth: Quickly failing is the best tool we have to course correct.
The Exec truth: Ongoing market factors of instability (end of cheap money, on-going inflation and increased costs, lower stock market performance) means executives have a lot to prove quickly. They can't take risks that may have been encouraged 5 years ago, because of increased pressure from investors to deliver on-going results.
The hard truth: A lot of organizations are operating out of fear and not out of opportunity. Instead of seeing what's possible and what steps need to be taken to get there, the easy/safe option of what will get us revenue today is often chosen over an investment that could take months or a year or more to come to fruition.
My opinion: If we can't make hard decisions or take some calculated risks in product, we'll continue to falter in our ability to deliver. We have to accept some risk for reward.
Link to post.
Reason 9: An undefined discipline
Symptom: Product is not a well defined discipline.
Product Management has been around for decades but is still a relatively "new" discipline. We blur the lines of what product management is and what it can do. Every organization has different expectations of product and often wants PMs to do the role of more than one job consistently.
At Product Led Orgs: Product is strategy, the voice of the customer, not in the weeds of delivery but rather focused on what we should be building, why and proving out the merits of those ideas. They may or may not be involved in delivery but at larger orgs this gets handed off for delivery and handed back for monitoring and post-release updates on performance and impact.
At non-product led orgs: Product is strategy, and the voice of the customer but also: QA, Project Management, Delivery Management, Data Analysts, Business Analysts, Research.
A common thought that seems to be bubbling up is "Anybody can do product so we don't need someone to specifically do it". What this idea misses entirely is that product is a set of hard and soft skills that are meant to compliment engineering (what's feasible), design (what do the users need), QA (what's usable?), business (what's profitable) - lots of folks have these skills but a great PM is great at not only these skills but knowing what they don't know ...and figuring out how to close that gap.
Often 2 years after joining an org, that PM has the most tenure on the team. Within 2 years you lose the people you spent the better part of a month or longer hiring for.
As a curious person who loves to problem solve - I want to figure out the issues at hand so we can determine real solutions for organizations. I think you see it in the tenure of PMs (according to a 2021 study) which averages between 6 months and 2 years within an organization about half the time of the average tenure of an employee (4 years). PMs are hard to hire for, with complicated interview processes that are usually 4-7 loops for a role that you will likely be hiring again in 25 months. As a business person - finding the answer on how to create better tenure and lessen turnover for a role like PMs that have significant impact seems like it should be top of mind.
Link to post.
Reason 10: Leadership woes
Symptom: Leaders who don’t do what they ask of others (aka eat their own dog food).
Let’s forget the irony for a moment that Zoom is pushing for in office collaboration (IMO that move brings into question the merits of the product offering and value as a company).
As an IC or a manager or an exec: if you expect your team to do something, you had better be prepared to set an example and sustain the ask for the long haul.
Whether that’s in person time, scheduling PTO, disconnecting when on PTO, respecting working hours or calendars, minimizing meetings, meeting agendas- set the example
🔥If it doesn’t work for you, it probably isn’t going to work for your team. 🔥
Link to post.
Phew, that was a lot of posts! Major thank you to Ashley for 1) writing these posts and then 2) agreeing to repurpose them here. I imagine it’s a post I’ll be sharing quite a bit.
Curious to hear what you think. Drop us some more thoughts in the comments!
Hi - I’m Jori and I’m a Product Coach. Here’s how to work with me ↩️
I work with Product Leaders and their teams to unlock their biggest career moments. If you’re looking for support - drop me a note, I’d love to connect. 🤝
I co-host Product Leadership Breakfast NYC, a monthly product breakfast series to bring together curated groups of PM leaders to connect and share learnings and insights over casual breakfast. If you live in NYC or find yourself passing through, join us! ☕
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