In a product mangement role,is it challenging being younner than many of the other people on your team?

Not if you’re smarter, faster, more responsible, and more experienced than other members of your team!

team or group working

What you’ll find when you get into the workplace is that— unlike when you’re in school— age alone is just not very important relative to other criteria like technical skills, teamwork, detail-orientation, following through on your commitments, etc.

But you’ll generally see that PMs do tend to have more experience than other members of the team, because the PM role involves a lot of judgement, decisionmaking, consensus-building, and other “soft” skills that often take longer to develop than technical skills.

Also (I’m totally generalizing here) younger employees, esp. those just out of college, sometimes have a deserved reputation of being a little sloppy with deadlines, communication skills, etc. In college where you’re really only responsible to yourself. If you stay out late partying and get a bad grade, you can make it up by cramming for the final. But at work if you don’t deliver on time or you do a half-ass job, then you’re letting your whole team down. It takes some people a few years to absorb this new reality.

So coming back to your original question, age alone shouldn’t hurt you too much, but if you’re not more experienced than others on the team, then you’d better have really good brains and soft skills and ability to deliver, combined with a lot of humility while you learn to be an experienced PM.