I’ve been saying for several months that, if not broken, the Product Management function is deeply fractured.
This date point from Payscale is the first quantity evidence to validate my hypothesis.
The culture, mental models, and frameworks of modern, digital, and cloud-based product developed and matured from 2010 to 2022.
The ecosystem of VC-backed start-ups were the seedbed for so much talent, ways of working, and mindsets.
The objective of those business models was to hack growth of users, attention, and monetize via a liquidity event.
because of macroeconomic factors, optimizing for attention and not cashflow is no longer viable.
This is a structural and systemic challenge, and even CPOs are vulnerable, attached to sunk cost, with high egos, and honed motivated reasoning to deny anything is even wrong.
Product managers who can make sense of this shift feel it in their bones and that’s why they want out.
Professionals who over-index in empathy, curiosity, and systems-thinking are running head-first into authoritarian, hierarchical, and unfeeling brick-walls.
This vibe isn't just PdM, it's also endemic to Sales and Marketing.
I think it's a reflection of the last 10 years of career development which occurred during a financially aberrant period of history, optimizing culture, mental models, and frameworks for stated preference (i.e. attention) rather than revealed preference (i.e. cashflow).
Between the polycrisis, the global becoming personal, and a dearth of critical-thinking, there's a lack of sense-making and vision, which is what PdM is supposed to be tasked with.
What does this mean if you’re in product, want in, or want out?
It will get worse, before it gets better.
links:
Payscale: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/14/the-jobs-people-most-want-to-quit-one-pays-144000-dollars-a-year.html
Existential Crisis for Product Management