AI might make your work easier. But humans will still be difficult.
That friction and tension you're feeling at work? It's a feature, not a defect. And those difficult situations aren't going away any time soon.
Every product job would be so much easier, if it wasn’t for one thing: the people we have to deal with as we try to make stuff happen.
Engineers! Designers! Sales teams! Customer success! Marketing! Execs! All these humans with their opinions and their needs blocking our path to product perfection.
We have the data, the frameworks, and we’ve also got Chat GPT/ Gemini/ Claude to save us all a ton of effort, let us move at the speed of sound and tell us we’re awesome in the process. But still these pesky humans insist on getting in the way.
‘Twas ever thus, and is likely to stay so.
One the many bits of Jeff Bezos wisdom passed down to me during my time at Amazon, was (and I paraphrase wildly) ‘don’t think about all the stuff that’s going to change over the next 10 years, think about the stuff that’s going to stay the same’
And in the product world the one thing that is going to stay the same is the persistent friction and tension with other teams and individuals.
Yes a lot of the discussion / hype/ LinkedIn boosterism right now is all about how AI will change what we build, and how we build it, and generally how we work, but I think we’ll find the AI stuff quite easy and energising. The humans we still have to deal wtih, much less so.
I’ve noticed when I’m coaching (and I accept that this might well be just the nature of those who chose me as their coach) that around 80% of the challenges people face are people problems. Not only that they’re problems that I recognize not just from my product experience, but also from the early parts of career before I even knew what a product manager is.
Sometimes, it’s true, we’re talking about the challenges of dealing with people who are some combination of unreasonable, incompetent and inconsistent, and whose drive and ambition dwarfs their abilities and emotional intelligence. These situations can be horrific, but fortunately they are not the norm.
It’s a feature, not a defect
More often we’re dealing with what I’d think of as acceptable bounds of tension and friction. What I’d rather see as features of a healthy organization rather than defects.
A sales/ customer team that wants some feature built to land or retain a big customer - even though they know it’s not on your roadmap (that you shared with them last week) , nor does it fit with your strategy.
A tech lead who has made it clear that they’re utterly underwhelmed by your product strategy/ plans.
A finance team that expects you to demonstrate a near instant ROI on the stuff you’re building.
A CPO who comes back from an exec offsite with a metre-long list of ‘great ideas’ that will now take you at least a week to respond to.
A CEO whose response to every plan you share is ‘great, but you need to do twice as much in half the time’
And as your career progresses and you step into a leadership position, these tensions become a bigger part of your job, and with higher stakes.
Why product jobs come with tension baked-in
The thing to realise is that there are several reasons why a product job includes - and going to to continue include these tensions.
There’s a bigger plan that depends on you
Your roadmap isn’t the whole story. It’s one component in a much larger organisational machine: revenue targets, retention goals, quarterly forecasts, marketing calendars, board expectations. All of these will normally depend in part on on product delivering. So other teams are looking at you as the linchpin in their plan, which creates pressure, impatience and friction by default.
Where there’s prioritization, there’s people and politics
Prioritisation is unavoidable and it’s never just maths. It’s ambition, incentives, territory, ego, and organisational gravity. Every decision you make implicitly says “this matters more than that” and people have feelings about being on the wrong side of that trade-off. No framework on earth removes the politics completely.
You need to get people who don’t report to you to do stuff
The standard management term for this is ‘influence without authority’ (this is the bible on the topic, if you’re interested). In many job functions, this is a higher order skill that you develop after you’ve learned about ‘influence with authority’ (ie managing people). Product flips that around. You’re expected to influence engineers, designers, sales teams and execs from day one without formal authority. Tough gig.
You are spending real money
You see engineers, squads, sprints and roadmaps - your CFO/ finance team just sees money being spent on a regular basis (an estimate of £700,000 a year for a fully resourced squad), and they will rightly be asking ‘what exactly are we getting back in return?’. Explaining that, for example, ‘revenue is a lagging indicator’ may well be factually correct, but that doesn’t make things any more tuneful for some finance ears.
Everyone who’s good will have a view on the product
From the CEO down, the people who care the most, regardless of their formal role will have a view on what’s good and not so good about the product. This will include those in, say, Sales, Customer Success and Support who speak to customers more than you every will. They will have ideas, they will feedback on your roadmap, and let you know what they think of your latest release. You
And the neat, simple solution? Sorry..
I know that I really should wrap this up with some nice acronym, or a lovely framework. Perhaps I’ll do some of that for some specific circumstances in future weeks.
If there’s a broad principle its that you need to be able to match all those frameworks and techniques you’ve mastered with broad influence and good judgement. Easy to say, but difficult to acquire. More on this soon..
The point is that these tensions should help you realise that some of the stresses, strains and tensions you feel when doing your job are there by design - not because you work in some dysfunctional hell hole.
So next time you’re pulling your hair out because sales wants that feature, engineering thinks you’re mad, and finance wants their ROI yesterday, remember: you’re not failing at your job. You’re doing it.