Hello, and thanks for taking the time to hear me out. I value you opinion and want to make sure that I’m not the issue here before I start looking towards other opportunities.

I’m a senior product manager with a company that I’ve been with about six years. The company is a legacy company, running old tech on old platforms relying on cash cow ERP systems to keep it afloat. As such, they always took the ‘kitchen sink’ approach to ERPs; whatever the client wants.

I was brought on board to launch an ERP system that the company had never managed to successfully launch. The system was not functional, and the development team and I redesigned, successfully relaunched, and added several features that the company had been chasing for over a decade.

In the early stages of relaunch, it became necessary to build partner relationships with our clients and let them guide roadmaps. After all, they were accepting a product that was essentially in a beta stage and we needed some internal guidance where we didn’t have specific domain knowledge, only adjacent.

We are a small company, a little more than a dozen people so we do have to be flexible.

As my role has grown, I’ve run into a conundrum. Our sales guy won’t learn to demo, so I am also a sales engineer. We don’t have a customer success team, so I am also the official onboarding person who makes sure this ERP is set up, ready to deploy, signed off on, and any customizations the client requests are in place (that’s a topic coming up shortly). I’m also the trainer in the organization for this product, any new client needs a 4 day training sessions and I’m the guy that has to do it. I’m also the top level support guy for the product. This is in addition to my normal roadmaps, strategy. Backlogs maintenance, testing features coming from the development team. Here, the Product Manager is also responsible for the UX/UI work. Whenever we get a series of leads, all work on the product stops because I'm tied up.

At this point there is no way for the product to be successful. If I were to spend all of my time onboarding, we still wouldn’t have enough clients to break even for well into a decade. This is, of course, assuming that the product stays marketable. We have an issue of scale, but we also have an old company that doesn’t like to do new things.

I’ve now been asked to redesign our other legacy erp, something still running on a green screen. This is a mammoth task, and I’ve made it clear to sales and the executive team that it’s not reasonable or acceptable to expect me to be a trainer, implementer, sales engineer, support tech, and UX/UI guy on the development team for my main product while overseeing and driving a major ERP that really needs its own team. I need help, and fast. We need more people, but the company can’t attract any because it pays 30 to 40 percent below market. Last I checked, they tried to get an on site, 10 year IBM / RPG developer for under 70k, and wondered why there were no applicants.

As the sales leads come in, I’m finding that on my main product (without the major redesign in place) I’m spending about 90 percent of my time dealing with sales or implementation actions, and less than ten percent working with backlogs, roadmaps, etc. I have no idea how the new product will fit into my schedule.

Fast forward to our yearly planning meetings, I was asked to be the project manager for the green screen erp in addition to my role while our Proj Mgr is out on maternity leave. I made it clear that I just don't have the bandwidth. I made my case that we need to stop the 'whatever you want' approach to clients, but the sales guy then went on to let me know that we must allow for customization for each and every client (even though this is a commodity product) because we are behind the curve. He doesn't understand that we are behind the curve because we let every sales lead direct our roadmaps.

So, this has me to a point where I can’t help but feel it’s time to leave. I don’t see a way for either product to be successful. I have no control over my roadmaps, because they are dictated by sales, and I'm stuck being all things to all people. When the sales leads come, all work on the product stops, and is followed by custom work that causes all sorts of headaches for existing clinets because 'we need the customer'. I get to deal with that fallout too.

Compensation is the least of my worry, but posts show that the company is paying 30 to 40 percent below market.

TLDR; The company insists on customizing each client, I’m stuck doing the jobs of PM, trainer, designer, implementer, company pays too little, product is destined to fail.

Do I try to save this or jump ship?

I appreciate your thoughts. Sorry for the length and rambling nature.

TaurusDH