> I took the role at a twenty year-old software company that's never had good product management, and the place is horrible.
> Over and over, the staff were pounded with "we are an engineering first company." Well, that means the engineering teams were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted and chase the shiny newest techs. There's 3.5 main products (really 4.5) each made from a different tech stack. There's another eight or so legacy products we have to support due to legacy demands. There's no inter-operability of standardization between products. Basically, there's no knowledge transfer, so the cost of development is through the roof.
I read this and thought you worked at my previous employer (household name in IT).
Engineering first company. Oof. This meant that as a PM, I got introduced to two of the products I'd be managing when Engineering and Architects had come up with a grand idea to build a component/subsystem to replace a previous one which had been over-engineered and never gained traction. They hadn't talked to any customers who used it, or that had liked the idea, but not the execution. They were just given a wide latitude to experiment (don't get me wrong, some experimentation and exploration is useful), got a greenlight for some time to prototype it, and did so.
And then, and only then, was I called in as a PM, and told, here's our prototype, here's some vague documentation of what we wanted to solve with this - "Now, Mr PM, can you shoehorn a Product Requirements Document around what we've already built and where we see it going, and can you do the Market Requirements Document to answer the questions we probably should have asked before getting this far?"
And then I would get catch-22s. Express doubt over the needed research and potential for the product and I was told by management that "PMs need to be passionate and fearless advocates for their products"... and then when I do try to eke something out, but lo and behold, our internal 'market', let alone customers are ambivalent about why we are working on a "v2" of this feature, when the market is either accepting the weaknesses of "v1" or have long built out their own solutions and moved on, and as a result we have a stakeholders meeting where we decide to end the experiment, and I'm chastised for "poor product management judgment" for not killing the project far earlier... the project I have no authority to kill, because it's an Engineering first company, and the project whose existence I learned of when it was tossed into my lap as a 90% complete prototype/proof of concept.
And then you have a few hundred (yep) Product Managers in our BU all trying to do their own thing, some empire-building, some truly product-focused... and it's a shit show.
I love being a product manager. I took a similar path as you... although most of my engineering background is SysAdmin/Devops/SRE/infrastructure and then management thereof. I love being a product manager, and thought that this role, at this company, would have untold potential and I could settle in, learn, grow, build from there. But it was everything from a Dilbert cartoon.