Feel like a failure – rethinking PM career

When I became a product manager, I must be honest, I was completely not sure what I was really getting into.

Now I am seriously rethinking if this is a suitable career for me.

I’m an immigrant working in a non-English speaking country, so job security has always felt high-stakes for me. My first PM role was at a pre-PMF startup where I wore every hat imaginable – writing code, running experiments, pitch decks, you name it. However, the company failed to get further investment and filed insolvency.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), I got a job before the company laid off everyone. This one was a bigger company (with around 600) which was a deep tech company focussed on SDK for B2B . However, I am not a domain expert here although I have some experience in the subject. I was assigned two products by manager.

The first product takes up 80% of the time because all the developers in the team are quite junior and their involvement in any scoping of a feature is quite minimal. I have to write specifications at a level of detail which is basically spoon-feeding them what to do, with minimal input from them. The engineering leader of that product is also harsh and impolite making it draining.

The other product is something that I inherited from a previous product manager who did not manage to release the product in his 2 years of dedicated work on the product. Somehow he ended up being business development head and the responsibility was passed on to me. There was no clear communication about what the product was intended to do, whats its differentiators are and the key business use case. I tried probe about this in multiple ways but there was no response. The product state was in a bad condition that it took multiple refactoring to make it reach a state that was atleast functional in its stripped minimal condition. Since it had no clear goal, use cases or users to talk to – i actually had to work on some initial starting point ideas and even found users through my own initiative to get feedback about product.

Now the previous PM and other stakeholders are pressuring me saying there’s “no progress” and “no MVP.” My manager’s response when I flagged the time split was to “find time somehow.” When I asked him to define MVP scope, his answer contradicted every other stakeholder.

I feel like I am in a complete mess and would not reach success in my current role since I lost trust. I am having immense self doubt if its a me problem or if was setup for failure. I feel if even I m suitable in continuing in this role anymore and am afraid to switch because what if the next role also ends up like this. Also the job market is not great and me being in a non-english speaking country adds additional compleixty in my job search. I have a desire of starting something on my own but I also have a fear, that if I suck at my job currently how would I succeed there. Also I do not have a concrete idea yet.