It's supposed to be hard

Ashwin Goyal

— 1 min read

I've been a Product Manager for seven years, and most weeks go the same way: something broke. A launch went sideways. Tech debt grew again. The data isn't matching expectations. Someone just questioned the priorities we locked in a few weeks ago.

And every time, I think: this is hard. Why is this still hard?

The engineer's dilemma

I used to be an engineer, and engineers have a beautiful reflex: if something important hurts twice, you RCA it, build a system, and never feel that pain again.

For many years, part of me kept waiting for the meta-fix for this job. Better processes, more experience, some book, now AI. Surely at some point the job stops being hard.

It hasn't. And for a long time I read that as failure. Either mine (I haven't figured it out) or the industry's (we as a whole still haven't figured this out).

But it's supposed to be hard

The role exists because a few things are permanently hard: getting humans to work together, shipping into the real world, keeping everyone up to date, absorbing surprises.

A firefighter doesn't conclude the fire department is broken because there keep being fires. Same here.

AI won't fix it

Every tool that removes friction raises ambition: when shipping gets easier, we ship more, coordinate more, promise bigger. The hard doesn't disappear, it migrates to the latest frontier.

Tips for the next hard week

  1. Rename the feeling. When you catch "why is this so hard," swap it for "this is the part I'm for."
  2. Budget for fires. Expecting the unexpected makes it expected. Leave slack.
  3. Pick hard problems on purpose. If a roadmap item scares no one, it probably matters to no one.
  4. Talk to other PMs. Everyone is having some version of the same week.
  5. Zoom out. Any given Tuesday is chaos. Any given year, things shipped and people grew.

You get stronger, the game gets harder

I love roguelite games. There's one I like a lot called Brotato. You're a potato holding six weapons, surviving waves of aliens. Between waves you shop, level up, come back stronger. But the next wave comes back stronger too. You scale, it scales. The reward for winning is a harder game.

Same for Product Managers. The waves get bigger because you're getting stronger. So don't worry. It's supposed to be hard.