Working for Facebook or Google does not need to be the Product Manager dream
If you look around the web for information about working in product roles, then 99 times out of 100 you'll come across YouTube videos, Medium stories, or blog posts all about working at Facebook, Google or Amazon.
It's like these three mega-corporations as well as having a monopoly in their markets also have a monopoly on how product management works. And this is just plain wrong!
There are many thousands of software companies in the world, and the vast majority do not have the scale, the turnover, the customers, the teams that the Big 3 have.
That means, the vast majority of product managers who get a job in product management won't be working for the Big 3, they'll be working with much smaller organisations who do not operate in the same sphere as the Big 3.
They may be the only person doing product management in their organisation.
They may be responsible for the entire product and not just customer retention or onboarding product management.
They may be in an organisation that is only just starting out down the road of focusing on product management.
And because of these situations, the guidance given by former PMs of the Big 3 might not 100% transfer to the world of a PM in a smaller organisation.
Yes, some of the skills are going to be common, but you might not get the time to run multiple A/B tests to determine the optimum onboarding process, because you've got users to interview, stories to write, releases to prep for, across the entire product and not just one area.
I'm not saying their experience isn't valid, just that it isn't gospel.
As a product manager in a smaller organisation, you'll likely get exposed to many more stakeholders, tasks, decisions, and challenges than if you were one PM sitting within a larger PM team, focusing on one business metric.
Personally, I love the variety that being a PM in a smaller organisation brings. One day you're improving sign ups and interviewing premium subscribers about their future challenges, the next day your optimising payment processes and writing release notes.
For me it beats the never ending running of tests to incrementally improve my one metric.