What Makes Product Management Hard and the Skills PMs Need
A product manager is responsible for making a product succeed. That single sentence explains why the role is difficult. A PM must define what success means, explain it to teammates, persuade people to commit, and move the work forward so the product can be built as envisioned. Many stakeholders are involved, and the PM must steer the project so it stays on course. All of this has to happen within limited time.
In short, a PM must collaborate with many people and still deliver the best possible outcome inside tight time limits. That is why the job is hard.
Before starting my company I worked as the PM of a silo that launched a new service at a startup. My days looked like the schedule above. Before arriving at the office I reviewed what each stakeholder inside and outside the silo had done, checked for anything we had missed, and confirmed whether people had finished on time. I wrote the agenda for the daily standup and ran the first meeting. I met with the operations team to discuss promotions for the new product, then used a short window before lunch to handle personal tasks.
The afternoon was a string of meetings. Besides the new launch, we had to improve the current product, so I created Jira tickets for the most urgent customer issues and met with engineering to plan fixes. Then I finally had about two hours for deep work. As a PM, this was the time to plan a core feature for the next version and to write a one page brief. If I missed that window, my own work would be pushed to the evening.
After personal work I checked product metrics and met with data analysts. To close the day, I walked the product designer through the feature ideas, explained why the feature mattered and how it should work, heard concerns, and discussed improvements.
That was a single day. It had five meetings, with personal work squeezed in between. From a schedule like this, you can see what makes the job hard and what skills help a PM do it well.
What makes product management hard
1. Several projects at the same time
A project has a defined purpose with a start and an end. In startups you often need to reach several goals in a short time, so multiple projects run in parallel. Many PMs handle two to four projects at once. Even within one product, there are subprojects for features and issues.
As projects move forward, the number of related tasks and meetings grows fast. If you do not manage them well, a project can fail. A PM needs to know, at any moment, what must be managed for each project and where each stream is headed. Otherwise you will spend hours in unproductive catch up. Separate and manage tasks, meetings, and knowledge by project so you can keep control.
This matters not only for you but also for stakeholders. If work is not tracked and shared, even the stakeholders will be confused about what was decided and what to do next. Then you spend more time just to realign. That is how unproductive meetings multiply and meetings for the sake of meetings appear.
2. Work scattered across many places
PMs collaborate with engineering, design, operations, marketing, and more. Each group uses different tools. Engineers manage issues in Jira. Designers work in Figma. Marketing uses the tools that fit their work. This distributed reality will not disappear, so the PM must track it without gaps.
Make it a daily routine to review the places where work appears. Start the day by scanning the tools where requests arrive so you reduce the chance of missing something important.
3. A day that alternates meetings and solo work
The more stakeholders you have, the more meetings you will have. That leaves you finishing personal work between meetings, and if you do not finish, you will push it into the evening after others go home. The key is to plan your own work in advance, so when you return from a meeting you already know what to do and can dive in. Many PMs start thinking only after a meeting ends. Time slips away, and the next meeting begins. The cycle repeats.
If you do not plan proactively, unproductive time grows. You can spend a long day at work and still feel you did not accomplish anything. Prevent that by Time Blocking your tasks. Keep ownership of your time so you can move work forward.
For details on using Time Blocking as a PM, see the dedicated post.
The PM is the person who makes it happen
A PM must deliver results with many stakeholders and within set hours. You often verify what others are doing, nudge unfinished work, and spend a whole day persuading people why a certain direction matters. It is natural to wonder when you will do your own core PM work. If you understand why this role is hard and where the difficulty comes from, you can derive the skills you need.
If you manage by project and keep a clear view of what you have done and what remains, you can cut the time lost to switching even while handling multiple projects. If you set your own plan in a day full of meetings, you can use time more productively. If you make it a routine to gather scattered work, you can manage without gaps. With these habits you become the person who makes work happen, the person who owns the product direction, and the person who stands at the front when users come to love the product, using that energy to build the next result.