Junior product managers face both opportunities and challenges in the constantly evolving tech industry. They are learning to oversee the development and launch of new products while developing a deep understanding of the market, user behavior, and technology. Despite the industry’s ongoing changes, the potential for these new product managers to shape the product’s future and make a significant impact is vast.

With this immense opportunity, it’s natural to make blunders while navigating the complex landscape of product management. While these missteps may be inevitable, it’s important to learn from them to grow as a professional. To help, we’ve gathered insights from top senior product managers who have generously shared their expertise. In this article, we’ll explore the most common mistakes made by junior product managers and provide actionable advice on how to overcome them. Our panel of experts includes:

These experienced product managers have identified the following seven critical mistakes that junior product managers often make, along with guidance on how to avoid them: 

  1. Putting the solution before the problem
  2. Lack of confidence
  3. Difficulty saying “no” 
  4. Misusing or ignoring data
  5. Poor stakeholder management
  6. Overidentifying as the CEO of Product
  7. Insufficient understanding of the customer or product.

By learning from these common errors, junior product managers can gain confidence, improve stakeholder management, and better understand customers’ needs to create products that customers love. Keep reading to learn more.

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→ Learn growth and realize the maximum potential of your product in Product Growth Simulator.

→ Learn to apply generative AI to create products and automate processes in Generative AI for Product Managers – Mini Simulator.

→ Learn AI/ML through practice by completing four projects around the most common AI problems in AI/ML Simulator for Product Managers.

Q. What are the most common mistakes junior PMs make and how can they avoid them?

Putting the solution before the problem

A common mistake I see among junior product managers is the belief that they have to define what the team will actually build. This can often result in detailed specifications or features that leave little room for the team to experiment and (almost always) poor results. It takes practice to find a good collaboration with the team and understand that you as a product manager are responsible for defining the problem and not the solution. Building the solution will be a continuous trade-off between commercial viability, technical feasibility, and usability. You are mainly responsible for commercial viability.

Anton Larsson (Senior Product Manager at Volvo Cars)

Only focusing on the solution is a common misstep if you came from a client focused industry (like I had). It takes time to train our mind muscles to not jump to implement the solution proposed by the one client. In my experience, we built far more scalable and sustainable solutions when we spent enough time refining the problem statement and understanding all target users.

Zareena Ashraf (Senior Product Manager at Booking.com)

Falling in love with the solution is a mistake that I’ve seen. Every solution is built to meet a business objective or to solve a problem. Junior product managers will evaluate various solution options and may end up liking a specific solution for a myriad of reasons. For example, a solution might use the latest “cool” technology or might be the “cheapest.” However, when product managers take their eyes off the problem statement, the solution delivered typically loses its business justification. If it was supposed to solve specific customer pain the consequences can be painful.

Sowrirajan Padmanabhan (Senior Product Manager, Cybersecurity)

One of the main problems that people face when starting off in product management is the focus on requirements instead of gaining a good understanding of the problem space. There is a tendency to build what a customer asks for instead of taking a step back to understand the persona, problem space, and the impact. This can lead to the creation of a perfect solution or feature for the customer that shouts the loudest, which is ill-suited for the vast majority. Such a short term win can have a long term impact on satisfaction and ultimately retention.

Andras Horvath (Senior Product Manager at Microsoft)

A common mistake is starting with features instead of problems and becoming too feature-focused. For example, wanting to incorporate AI into the product and directly focusing on getting buy-in without clearly defining the problem and why AI would solve it. Always start with the problem before the solutions. It may be tempting to create complex solutions to problems. This can result in longer development time and increased costs. Simplicity is often better, and product managers must consider the trade-offs between complexity and usability.

Nicu Parente (Senior Product Manager at Salesforce)

Imitating the competition under the guise of competitive intelligence is a problem. Product managers are expected to know the market. They need to see what their competition is up to. But I also see a lot of “Our competitor is doing this so we should, too.” I believe this to be the lazy approach. Instead, think of the end states and the best path to that state. Think of whether the said feature makes sense for your product and customers. Think about whether you want to be recognized as the product pioneer or the follower.

Soumitra D. (Senior Product Manager at Walmart)