New to this world and the constant facilitation is taking a toll. As someone who is not a big fan of talking all the time, I sometimes have a moment of blankness/say something funny instead, mainly to fill the silence.
Any one else? Any stories to share?

I'm so burned out on constantly needing to stay on top of everything AI. Tired of the tech culture and where it's heading. Exhausted from the theatrics. At this point, I just want to do boring solid work, stay under the radar, and not have the stress of all the other bullshit.

Is that even possible? Anyone have advice for other tech positions I could pivot to that may be more coast-able?

I like solving hard problem and I'm intrinsically motivated to do a good job. I don't want to slack, I just want less of the bullshit.

The doc is where the work happens for me, it's messy and real and full of points and counter points. Then the client wants a deck, so i sit there translating my own finished thinking into slides, and something always gets flattened in the move.

The ideas are done, i'm just re-typing them into boxes. is there a clean way to go from a turn doc to a deck the client respects, or do you all just accept the re-typing?? how do you all do it?

3-year-old codebase, 2 senior devs who are careful about best practices, security, testing. They're also equal partners in the company, so any efficiency gain lands directly in their pockets.

I'm a PM. I asked this same question ~9 months ago and the consensus was: reading/reviewing AI-generated code is harder than writing it, so my PRs would just be a tax on the senior devs. Not worth it.

Models and tooling have moved a lot since then. Honest gut check:

A. Is it reasonable now for a PM to open PRs with code written via Opus 4.8 (or better), on the condition that every contribution goes through heavy QA and testing before merge?

B. Any world where a PM pushes without a PR? Or is that still insane?

Where's the line in July 2026?

Edit:

People are asking why this is even a need. Two reasons: (a) the devs are slammed with other projects, and (b) the info gap between me and them creates a lot of back-and-forth, ping-pong, slow turnaround. On roles: we're all equal partners, so better process and faster results benefit everyone regardless of our traditional titles. And it goes both ways - the devs are free to push AI- or human-driven PM-side upgrades too, and they sometimes do.

What are you using it for? Has it been helpful?

I am a PM with 1.5 years of product experience and 4 years of engineering background (was honestly lucky to have broken into the field without an MBA) and now that I am finally trying to switch - it seems impossible. I get rejected without even reaching an interview. I see people in the field with more experience but really bad product experience land prestigious roles even AI PM roles without ever properly using Claude. Not able to make sense of the market, is this something you guys have also experienced or noticed? How would you go about navigating such a scenario?

I’m a product manager working on predictive ML products. A lot of how my team communicates exploratory data analyses, proposals for model changes, etc is through documents.

I find more and more that some of the analysts I work with are getting, shall we say, overly reliant on AI to pump out work product. They use AI not just to generate queries but also to generate insights and recommendations. And of course the results suck and are flat out wrong a lot of the time. I end up spending so much time commenting on their docs to clean that shit up before it gets passed to an exec who doesn’t know any better about how incorrect the findings are.

I’ve tried multiple times to escalate to my analytics manager partner and am getting a lot of shrugs, we will go update the Claude skill for next time, this is the way things are now, etc.

I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind!

Is anyone else seeing this? How are you dealing with AI sloppy work product on your teams?

There was a big salary thread a couple years back but it'd be great to get some updated info in the big 2026.

Please share your job title, salary, age, location, and education. I'll start:

Senior Product Manager, 177k, 36F, Santa Monica, and BA.

Hi! I'm wiring up product analytics to our web app and chose PostHog for the session replays. I'm blocked on the first prereq which is compliance. What the hell is a DPA and do i really have to do this stuff? Thank you so much, really appreciate any help!

Hi all

I have to conduct a market research where I have to visit certain stores that sell products online and then understand some of their processes.

I have the stores that I want to visit/contact but I do not know how to approach without them ghosting me.

People who have done similar surveys, how did you approach them and convince them to give some of their time. I can try cold messaging but I feel it would get ignored easily.

I’ve been thinking about the recent discussions around PM influencers, and it made me realize I consume way too many newsletters! But maybe it might help some. Here’s the ones that I actually keep reading and why.

Product / Tech

Stratechery (Ben Thompson)
This is probably the one that’s had the biggest impact on how I think strategically. I originally subscribed after being told I “wasn’t strategic enough” during an interview years ago (I now pay for it), which motivated me (out of spite and rage) to find the smartest strategic writing I could. Ben’s analysis of Big Tech competition, moats, and business models has genuinely helped me think better.

The Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz)
Great deep dives into engineering organizations, Big Tech, startups, and software development. I starting by reading his tweets and liked them so much I subscribed but was a recent add. I tend to like Engineering made simple newsletters probably because of my eternal regret not doing an Eng degree :-(

a16z
Name speaks for itself, they publish some excellent guest essays across a breadth of topics from people in the domain itself and not just AI, but infrastructure, hardware, startups, and emerging technology. I find the breadth of topics valuable. I still don't know how to spell Andreessseeen though :-)

ProducTea (Leah Tharin)
One of my favorite writers on growth, PLG, and SaaS. I consistently come away with something practical I can apply.

The Neuron
My default AI newsletter. There are hundreds now, but I like that it’s concise and regularly introduces useful AI tools rather than just covering headlines. Useful list of AI tool links at the end, some have significantly changed my life no joke.

Technically
Makes engineering concepts approachable for non-engineers. I wish more of the content were available outside the paid tier, but the free articles are occasionally excellent.

Making Software (Dan Hollick)
This one is delightfully nerdy. Topics like how fonts are designed, how displays work, and other deep technical rabbit holes. I rarely have time to read every article, but I always save them. And who knows, maybe if youre dropped into medieval times it might be useful to know how to build a screen :-D

The Hustle
Good general tech and startup news. It’s easy to skim and usually surfaces interesting stories I would’ve otherwise missed. Fun list of links at the end to waste your time with in a fun way. I like the cute animal one :-)

Ignite Insights
A newer addition for me. Interesting AI commentary, interviews, and industry analysis.

Outside Tech

Medium
I still pay for it. Plenty of noise, but there are enough thoughtful articles (and admittedly plenty of “10 free apps you should know” posts, but I like it because I am cheap hah) that I get value from it.

Quora
Somehow I’m still on Quora after all these years. Occasionally you stumble across genuinely fascinating long-form answers. Like reading about the Roman Empire twice a day :-)

Uncharted Territories (Tomas Pueyo)
History, geography, AI, economics, and geopolitics. His essays connect topics in ways I don’t see very often. He's a ?former? SaaS guy and does interesting things like "how Islam grew virally" applying SaaS concepts to historical topics.

The ones that uh, never clicked for me

These are just personal preferences.

Lenny’s Newsletter
I know it’s incredibly popular, but I’ve never really connected with Lenny's writing. Clearly I’m in the minority, so I’d actually be interested in hearing why people like him. And he has a conference now so what do I know.

Marty Cagan
His material is useful if you’re new to product management, and I learned things from his books years ago. It just doesn’t resonate with me as much today given how quickly AI is changing the profession and his content is a bit dated.

I’m really trying to keep up with all the AI hype. Every week there’s something new: a new agent, LLM, better way to write your Skill.md, people creating PM “operating systems”, etc.

Oh and not to mention, the endless AI PM salary posts, training materials (and recycled content), repost, comment “free”, like, rinse repeat.

What if you’re not doing anything related to AI? But it’s important ground work for AI and overall AI security? What if you haven’t built anything in the past 2 years (but you have done it before… just not now with current job).

What if you end up just end up coasting through your 9-5 and never find the time to “upskill”?

Anyone out there feeling the same? Any PMs out there with families going through the same thing?

I'm curious how y'all handle initiatives and stakeholder requests that go against your personal principles? I don't mean just how you manage the situation with your bosses, but also how you deal with them internally (how do you, what keeps you going, how you view the company, do you start looking for a new job).

For example, at one of my previous jobs, old customers were promised their subscriptions would stay on the original yearly price as long as they don't canceled or allowed them to expire. The request I got was to effectively break that promise and switch all of them to current prices. Mind you, this was not a vital product, but I still considered the move to be unethical. I tried appealing to a few higher-ups whose departments would've been impacted, but they had already checked out and left the company shortly after. I ended up making the change, but it left a bad taste in my mouth and I decided to leave the company as soon as I'd finished the project I was working on.

I know some of you work in companies that have done much worse, so I'm curious to hear your takes.

Heya, I've joined a company as a freelance PM (only product person internally), to help them transform their legacy on-prem software to a B2B Saas. They're using the opportunity to update the tech stack, rethink the UX of the current tool and switch their target users to one similar to their current one, except the market is a bit less legally regulated so it should be a simpler product.

When I arrived, I had been told the designs and UX had been worked on for "4 years" for the original target users, yet I'm discovering that it's been done in silos, not validated by users nor internal stakeholdes, not documented (no functional specs), and the sole designer (UX but doing product design) is designing based on what some people tell him to do, and thus can't explain what most of the features are. Moreover, the "4 years" are actually a few days here and there, not really managed by anyone, with priorities changing all the time and nothing being fully done. Due to the complexity of the product, the way things have been done to date, the fact that we need to base ourselves on the old product, the designs supposed to be a MVP are huge to develop yet it doesn't seem possible/acceptable to reduce them.

From a dev perspective, before I joinded neither the priorities no requirement had ever been clear, priorities have been changing all the time depending on whims of leadership, and wishes/opinion of the CTO.

Additionnally, leadership is pressuring to "see something" (aka see something developped) as for them it's been 4 years this project has started, yet imho there should be at least a few months of product design and validation before being able to dev things properly.

I've defined a kind of internal MVP so the devs can work on something and we can have a full loop of a user flow; yet I'm worried some of this work might be thrown away as some things are still being figured out from a UX perspective; as in order to handle complexities the designer needs to design a more fully-fleshed product.

Any suggestions on how I can ensure the dev team doesn't build things that get thrown away or reworked endlessly because the specs weren't complete ?

I'm the only one with product and agile methodology/experience, so no one to relate / get help from internally.

Is it actually true that, on average, an app loses 77% of its users within the first 3 days and around 90% within the first month?

Does that literally mean if I acquire 100 users today, only about 23 are still using the app after 3 days, and only around 10 remain after 30 days?

Are these real industry benchmarks, or are they based on specific categories like gaming apps?

Curious to know more about this.

Watched the World Cup final on Sunday and it felt like watching an algorithm play football. For two hours, it looked like Argentina was trapped in a cage - zero space, zero movement, and barely a single real chance on goal.

I ended up watching a tactical breakdown on YouTube afterward explaining how Spain pulled it off. The positioning, shadow marking, and midfield overloads were absurdly precise. It was so calculated it felt like AI playing. I live in Spain and I love the team, but watching a match that over-optimized was rough. On paper it was brilliant, but to watch, it was almost mechanical.

The exact same thing is happening in tech right now. Everyone is trying to use AI to replace human judgment, human creativity, and human mentorship, turning people into passive consumers of automated suggestions.

That feels like the wrong approach. AI shouldn't be the mentor, the coach, or the vision. AI should be the engine running in the background—doing the invisible heavy lifting, protecting your calendar, and organizing the steps so human guidance can actually take root. Human insight gives you the roadmap; AI should just build the defense around your day so you can execute it.

Where do you see people over-optimizing with AI right now?

My organization is now using Claude Code extensively for development and it's actually going pretty well. I want to help them organize our PRDs better.

Prior to my joining, the PM org was pretty disorganized, with PRDs as word docs stored in a google drive or attached directly to JIRA epics.

We're moving to .md requirements documents, which are working pretty well, but I want to find a way to organize them so that they're in a central location, easily accessible by anyone on the product or dev team, and ideallysearchable.

In the past I got a lot of that for free with Confluence but I think there might be a better way with the new specs. Other teams I've seen keep their PRDs in their git repos, either in a single PRD space or put the PRD in its own feature's space.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's tested out these approaches in the last couple of years

I work in a fintech company in Mumbai & having 3+ years experience working in fintech.

I am earning 18.5 LPA. Let's discuss this in the comments. How much each of you are earning in what domain? My domain is fintech SaaS.

Moreover, recently I am looking for a change. So, if anyone can tell their story of any good hike from the previous salary & share some insights.

I spent the first few years of my career chasing stability and money rather than PM titles.

I started as a Product Consultant (basically product support at a market-leading B2B SaaS company in its niche), then moved into a Product Analyst/Specialist role at a well-known research firm. They paid the bills, but they weren't really PM roles.

Five months ago, after trying for a long time, I finally transitioned into my first proper Product Manager role.

It's a startup where I report directly to the CPO. We build 0 to 1 MVPs for clients, which sounded exactly like the kind of experience I wanted.

Here's how it's gone so far:

- Week 1: I was hired knowing I'd need some PM training, so I worked on an imaginary product.

- First Month: I was assigned to an internal D2C product that's been in the market for over a year but has only ~5 WAUs (lesser now) and about $800 in lifetime revenue. It's the passion project of one of the founders, so everyone keeps working on it despite there being very little user traction. The roadmap constantly changes, and a lot of the direction boils down to "copy what the market leader is doing." This is also the product I return to whenever there isn't client work.

- Best part so far: I got staffed on a paid pre-sales POC for a large Gulf client. It was difficult, I had to redo a lot of work, but I absolutely loved it. It finally felt like real product management: thinking through problems & systems, planning, working with technical architecture, and taking ownership. The client loved the POC, but the deal eventually fell through due to misaligned expectations.

- Now (5th Month): I'm back on the internal product.

That's where my concern starts.

It's not that I'm learning nothing. I am. But after spending years in adjacent, non-PM roles, I don't want to spend more time building experience that doesn't align with where I want my career to go.

The bigger issue is that I genuinely don't believe in this product. I wouldn't use it, recommend it, or even pitch it. It's a saturated market with an old idea that's essentially being made "AI-native," and the direction changes every few weeks. Without real users or meaningful data, it often feels like we're just building for the sake of building.

Every now and then I hear I might get moved to another client project once a deal closes, but I've heard that multiple times now and nothing has materialized. So I start and end most days working on the same internal product.

I'm not planning to leave immediately. The pay is good, the flexibility has genuinely improved my life (I could finally afford to start my master's), and the people here are some of the best I've worked with after coming from a very toxic workplace.

But I keep wondering:

Am I getting the kind of PM experience that will make me competitive 1-2 years from now? Or am I unintentionally drifting into another role that won't prepare me for the kind of PM positions I eventually want in larger product companies?

Has anyone else been in a similar situation? Is this just what the first few months of a PM career look like, or are these valid concerns? I have a lot of doubts about my present-self and future-self these days.

There, I said it. Apologies to all the wonderful design people out there though.

The more I work in product, the more I feel the product designer role is redundant, and sometimes even a bottleneck. I have worked with a lot of them, but they just don't seem to get key concepts around product strategy, agile delivery, etc. In worst cases, they end up getting too territorial and start treating the product as a personal portfolio of some sort.

And with all this AI and stuff, I honestly feel I can do a far quicker and hassle-free job by working in an integrated environment rapidly connecting strategic goals with user workflows, optimizing existing workflows in the app and coming up with design proposals.

I'm pretty sure many would disagree with me, but surely something needs to change in this whole product design thing, after having observed and worked in a myriad of teams for over 20 years.

Don't want to call out any specific products, but I'm curious to know what's it like to work as a PM on a product that you know everyone hates, but still makes a lot of money for the business.

TLDR : How to handle engineering teams that just won't collaborate?

I have been working as a PM for the past 2 years in this organization for an internal platform. When the joined my challenge with engineering was that they were very slow and asking obvious questions (sometimes even questions about English vocabulary).

Since last 1 year I see two very stark changes where the engineering team is either building features and products w/o PMs and honestly are building good quality stuff vs. when I ask for a feature to be built they are very reluctant and give me shoddy output, and very long SLAs. My requirements are ignored and engg is directly talking to users, getting their inputs and building stuff w/o PM ever even knowing. When they build something and it does not get adopted is when they come to me and ask me to change manage with stakeholders.

In our current model with Engg. once a feature is deployed they have the BAU engg team managing the daily bugs, so that PMs can focus on larger features.

My boss - Director PM is insecure (so am I a bit) and is asking me why is engg getting the requirements and you are not.

I feel there is a organization problem here where the Product and Engg teams are not there to support each other but have a blame game relationship. Is something fails, Engg points to product requirements at the drop of the hat, instead of being more collaborative.

This is my first gig as a Product Manager, never in my previous experience have experienced such a toxic relationship with Engg, I have always had good partners.

Also I am not saying my work is perfect, my requirements are not super clean always, engg does need more clarity from me - if they ask I am always more than happy to clarify on call or document them. But if I am told after 3 hours of meeting across 2 weeks that requirement is not clear therefore nothing can be delivered is just very bad partnership.

PS - I work in the US now. I used to work in India before.

Does anyone have any articles/podcasts on developing a cohesive, strong product strategy in the age of AI? Thank you :)