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Product managers are potentially both the most helpful and potentially most damaging hire you can make, as you are ceding them control (if you do) over the very

Product managers are potentially both the most helpful and potentially most damaging hire you can make, as you are ceding them control (if you do) over the very definition of the value your company provides. I think someone like Steve Jobs keeping a lot of that control there is definitely of value - in not delegating it. I've worked with a lot of PMs that were like "this dialog needs to be more orange" (one defunct startup from many years ago), and miss the picture, because they are just kind of faking it -- they are the guy with the opinion and the title, because somebody had to do it, but not really trying to make the best choice for the end user. There are some that could be exceptional. (Speaking of several different companies where I've experienced this). You need to have someone with a really good gut feel and instinct, and a lot of passion to believe in the thing they are doing. But if a PM is a "CEO of a product", that makes it the most important choice in your entire organization -- for that product. If you have one product, that's huge. An alternative approach is to get a company really involved, to where everybody on the team has input in the product, and that you source the ideas from everywhere, but yeah, somebody still has to drive it. Depending on who you talk to PM can mean like 37 different things, and no one person can concentrate on all 37 -- you do need people doing all of those things, but I think it's GREAT if the person at the helm of your company is all about the product. Else, you're just cranking size and numbers? The purpose of the company, to me, is about creating the things you believe in and want to create - the business is the means to the end, and the food on the table along the way. Approaching it from a pure business perspective is missing a lot of the fun and opportunity.

omouse 11y ago
>Product managers are potentially both the most helpful and potentially most damaging hire you can make, as you are ceding them control (if you do) over the very definition of the value your company provides. I think it ties into what paul graham wrote about hackers making things for users. The more layers you have between the hackers and the users, there's more potentially that your product won't be that great. I've worked with product managers who supposedly talk to the users directly and channel that into the work us developers have to do but they always seemed to just copy the competitor or only make small changes whose value is questionable. >An alternative approach is to get a company really involved, to where everybody on the team has input in the product, and that you source the ideas from everywhere, but yeah, somebody still has to drive it. It's probably better to create the position of product manager from within.

omouse 11y ago

>Product managers are potentially both the most helpful and potentially most damaging hire you can make, as you are ceding them control (if you do) over the very definition of the value your company provides. I think it ties into what paul graham wrote about hackers making things for users. The more layers you have between the hackers and the users, there's more potentially that your product won't be that great. I've worked with product managers who supposedly talk to the users directly and channel that into the work us developers have to do but they always seemed to just copy the competitor or only make small changes whose value is questionable. >An alternative approach is to get a company really involved, to where everybody on the team has input in the product, and that you source the ideas from everywhere, but yeah, somebody still has to drive it. It's probably better to create the position of product manager from within.