A lot of people think they want something desperately, but they actually don’t.

When I started Aristos, I started 2 other batches too. So that people who actually bothered to show up in those and do their prep, could move up to Aristos, my main focus. All I heard were excuses.And I shut those two groups. Then I started a mentorship batch. This time I wanted to filter so I asked people to write a doc on why they wanted to do this. Also answer a few questions. People literally wrote essays. I selected a few. They came excited.

Once they realised that I won’t listen to their excuses about why their job sucks, their boss sucks, and how they hate PMing because of X factors, no one bothered to show up after the first session. Probably they wanted a therapist while I wanted them to become better at PMing. Hence despite people DM’ing me every week about PM coaching/mentorship, I won’t start another Aristos. Atleast not anytime soon. I will surely do occasional sessions when I am in the mood, but not another course.

(This is obviously my take, so there will always be the other side story. This post is mostly on why I won’t do another Aristos.)

Continuing my own biased take: I think the PM role is one of the most ambiguous generalist role out there.

You can learn all the frameworks out there, I have myself put 100s on my blog, but unless you are driven, show high agency, and are willing to put yourself out there you won’t be great at it. Hence I tell a lot of people who DM me to not even switch to this domain.

If you are not willing to put in the hours to prepare your switch to PMing, not taking advantage of a free course where someone is willing to put in the hours to teach you, then you are ngmi.

You are hoping that the teacher somehow “teaches you”, putting the onus on the other person to do more work than you, somehow get you excited about PMing, then you have failed the high agency test anyway. All things look exciting before you try it out. A joke, that is somewhat true that I repeat often: The most excited a PM is about product management is when they are entering this domain, the second most is when they are interviewing.

I know ICs who jumped to PMing because they thought they would be mini CEOs and they absolutely hated it. So if you are not okay to put in the hours when the excitement is peak and you have not even seen the harsh reality of PMing.