 Product management is the best career for people who want leadership, customer impact, and high salary. However, this career is not for everybody. I have interviewed over 20 product managers in fan companies and unicorns startups. Now I ask them this question, who shouldn't become a product manager? And here are their answers. Make sure to stay until the end of this video where I share with you the reason number 7, the most unspoken truth that most people do not tell you. This is Dr. Nian C.D., a direct product and feature in Forbes. It helps 100 people to land a dream PM job offer in fan companies and unicorns startups and continue to get promoted as a product leader. In this channel, we cover free product management training and tax trends. Make sure to like and subscribe and check out new videos every Tuesday. First of all, I have to say product management is the best career for myself. I truly felt so satisfied and so happy the first day I stepped into product management field and then grew my career quickly as a director and now as a product management coach. I made a video about why everybody should consider product management career right here. But in that video, I didn't tell you who shouldn't become a product manager and unspoken truth most people do not tell you. Truth number 1, you need to earn respect from all teams, especially the engineering team, which is the hardest to deal with. I just said in my last video, product management is a leadership position and a lot of time, given a product management title, you need to lead a cross-functional team. But it doesn't mean that people will follow your lead. That makes product management career very challenging. For example, engineering teams can literally reject your feature request. They were like, why should we build this product and why they need to prioritize so-called features and show me the customer interview result? Ha! It's a peacock. It's a peacock. Another peacock. Just fly off my roof. Yes, I live in Miami. There's a lot of peacocks around my house. They frequently give you a very hard time if you don't know how to man the room. And this is universal regarding big tech companies, fan companies, or unicorn startups. For example, luxury product managers at Google and TikTok told me that their engineering team frequently refused to work on the feature because they only want to work on more star metrics, any features that can help the company to grow, and you need to convince them. And especially for Google, it's crazy. They had to work on some fun, fancy, moonshot idea features, or engineering just felt like your idea is very boring. And sometimes engineer also tried to trick you. And for example, some features maybe only take one month to finish. There was an, oh, take six months to finish. In reality, what they mean is that they don't want to work on those features. Earlier in my career, when I was just a young Asian woman who looks 10 years younger than how I look, nobody respect me at all. And frequently, I was one who said ghost in the room, and in reality, I'm the one who's leading the product vision. And then I had to learn from my mistakes and learn how to review my personal brand and lead with authorities and leverage allies and mentors to help me to grow my career. And guess what? I was able to become a director product within four years just because I started learning from my mistakes and how to leverage the best way to grow. And I talked about how to be a personal brand in this video, where I talk about how I became a director, a product within four years as a minority woman. You can check out more videos right here. I'm also going to link it in the description of this video. Truth number two, you need to do lots of cross-functional team management. As a product manager, frequently, yes, we are the leader, but as a leader, we need to almost manage everybody. For example, legal team, sales and marketing team, customer support team, almost everybody, of course, your executive teams. But among the teams, the ones I hated the most work with is legal team. It's so painful, takes forever to review any contract and they are the hard rock, very hard to move. And everything, guess what? Sometimes you spend eight, seven hours doing all those meetings, just try to convince other people. I really wish I can spend more time building the product and talking to customers. But those kind of realities most people cannot talk about. That's why it may not be the great career for everybody who doesn't like cross-functional team management. And this is even true for Google. For example, I interviewed the senior director at Google, Jonathan, in my last podcast. He talks about he needs rounds and rounds and rounds exactly by end for even like one or two months for any product features. This is going crazy. How many times you need to propose your new ideas to executives? In advertising in Google, because the group was so big, you'd often be saying, OK, well, if I was a director, I might have to present something to a senior director and then they would be on board and then we would go to the vice president to present it to them and then maybe a group of vice presidents and then maybe the senior vice president. I would sometimes joke at its worst. It would feel like you had to present 10 times proving you weren't making a mistake before you could do anything. If you only want to stay in one lane and only do one thing, product management career is not right for you. If you guys don't know what does product management do on a day to day basis, feel free to go to this video and go to this checklist right here where you're able to download the day to day look like as a product manager. And so you have a full bigger picture regarding all the detailed tasks you're doing. I'm going to link it in the description of this video. Choose number three. Engineering team cannot function with clear requirement. This sounds like true, easy. However, most people do not know how to write clear requirement and engineering team really want you to write very specific acceptance criteria with many different examples. For example, earlier in my career, they literally asked me to decide the shade of pink they need to use for the car to action button. And sometimes I even solve math problem for my engineering team such as how to use API to pull data to calculate the average speed of cars on the road. So if your business consultant from Mackenzie used to write some very high level ideas of the business requirements, you're probably having a really big trouble working with engineering team because if you don't know how to write the detailed engineering phase in product requirement, it's very hard for you to even keep your job. I literally have someone reach out to me saying that her boss put her on a performance improvement plan was because her product requirement documentation was poorly written. She just write in a freestyle by watching some free YouTube videos. But she literally is about to get fired in her new job. Therefore, I recommend everybody really learn product management requirements very detailed, have hands-on skills before you even start your new career. And I'm going to make another video teaching you guys how exactly should write product management requirement in the right way so that you're going to excel in your new job to make sure to subscribe to this video. So once it's published, you'll be the first one getting notified. Number four, product management career is a very competitive career because only the smartest of the smartest people will choose to become a product manager. And you're literally getting paid as $300,000 per year and even more. This is the best career for people who doesn't want to code but getting paid as high as a software engineer and everyone want to become one. That's why it's very competitive and even at work people really want to be a better product manager even become a product manager is also very competitive. However, there is a way to solve this problem, which is you just need to create a portfolio to enhance your skills and also gain product management skills ahead of time before you even step into this new field. I still believe that this is the best career ever. However, if people do not like to stay competitive and do well in your job or just want to stay low, keep your older style, this is not a great career for you. And I'm going to link the 13 different kind of project to build your product portfolio in the link of the description. You guys can all start building your portfolio and become a competitive PM starting from today. Choose number five is a huge responsibilities and you may not be able to handle it or may not want to handle such a big responsibilities. As the product manager, you're a CEO or product, which is very true. If the product fail, it is your failure. If the product succeed, it's everybody's credit and frequently not all the product when you want to become very successful, some features not successful and gonna fail again and fail flat on your face. Of course, also getting awarded by being the best leader, creating best product features. So that's why there's always a risk by taking over this leadership position. So if you don't want to handle the stress of being a great leader, this is not a career for you. Number six, executive presentation. When you start building a product, you probably think about, let me just design some product features. But in reality, after you've designed the product feature, layout your product vision, you need to present your product vision for a road map to executives or stakeholders or even sales teams or even customers. So you're being asked to do a lot of executive presentation and those presentation could be as short as five minutes, could be also as long as one hour. Personally speaking, I found this executive presentation very exciting. I literally love this so much. It's also one of the reasons I love becoming a product manager. And also those executive presentation skills helped me to become a director product within four years. I was frequently asked to give executive presentation literally to many executives within the company and outside the company. However, it does come with a loss of pressure and requires to have great skills to present your team's vision and your team's outcome. So therefore, if you want to stay behind the computer, do not want to speak in front of a public audience, maybe this is not a career for you. Choose number seven. Sometimes it's not you are not good fit to become a product manager. Sometimes it is your company culture, your team culture could also be your manager. Most of you do not talk about the secret, but in reality, company cultures vary significantly. Some companies really empower individual product manager to become the leader, make their own decisions and convince the stakeholders and then they give you the freedom to grow. Some companies have really bad leadership such as some startup company. The CEO tell you exactly what the CEO wants to do. You're just the one who is executing the CEO's idea. Therefore, who you work with and how your manager helped to grow as an even senior product manager, become a director is very important for any people who step into the product management position. So therefore, highly recommend anybody to really research company culture before you even join any company as a product manager so that you can grow your career to do things that truly passionate about. Now you heard me bat not so much about product management and if you still want to become a product manager and you still believe that this is the best career you can ever find, I highly recommend you to watch this video we are describing details regarding why everybody should consider product management career why this is the best one for you to choose as well. Feel free to go to the link in the description download certain different kind of product portfolio ideas so you can jump start your PM career as well. This is Dr. Nancy Lee from PM Accelerator.org I'll see you in my next video right here.