How makers stay productive

• Customers overwhelmed with choice and information to inform buying decisions, and have less time to engage
• Competitive Market, Local & Global, Things are moving fast, disrupted and catching up
• Internal Stakeholders: team and management
• Managing too much projects & unfinished task & datelines
• Connecting with sales, support and customer success to source product ideas, validate priorities and roadmap

• Product launch Marketing … when does it start and how can it be effective without being overwhelming?
• Building a virtual team to get things done on time.

I used to code and design before switching to product management (and back to coding 1 year ago :-). It's really good to have dev/design background as a PM, I did enjoy working in the holistic way, and using all my experience to improve the product.

The difficulty for me was more in the politics of the job and I think that really depends on the company you end up working for. I had two problems specifically: I was remote to the headquarters where most other product people worked. So it was really difficult to keep up to date with all that was happening. And hard to socialize. Which you both need to coordinate your product vision and to influence people.

Secondly I had only direct control over the backlog for backend developers. But as a PM I needed stuff from front-end or app teams too. It was really hard to coordinate with these teams (again being remote didn't help). So that was very frustrating. I was also bad in planning my own work, like preparations for sprint plannings or strategic presentations for product roadmaps. And forgot the steps that lead up to certain decisions. I think now I have learned some tricks to prevent this.

Biggest problems I had/have is with changing or unclear mission of the company, which results in always changing directions, an unhealthy mix of product and project type customizations and mission, which are more mission impossible type (doing everything for everybody on whatever way) I do Road Map planning for such an environment and it's kind of an animated gif, nothing really stable.