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Well, no. If you're a developer or development manager working 70-90 hours a week developing and/or managing other developers, when do you have time to evaluate
by raganwald 17y ago
Well, no. If you're a developer or development manager working 70-90 hours a week developing and/or managing other developers, when do you have time to evaluate the market, keep track of every single competitor and potential competitor?
Do you run a spreadsheet loaded up with market data and demographics evaluating the potential revenue impact for all of the features you're thinking of including in the next release?
And so on and so forth. Product management is a full-time job on a substantial product. It may be that in small start-ups people wear many hats and you don't need it as a separate function. But if your team ever gets to the point that you can justify a full-time development manager, your team probably needs someone else with nearly full-time product management responsibility.
In addition to that, there are sometimes some benefits to separating product management from development management. Sometimes. Being a little divorced from the product's inner workings can provide a certain useful perspective. Hopefully, the product manager isn't wedded to the feature that a developer just spent three weeks building and can jettison it to ship on time :-)
- amichail 17y agoYou are thinking of what's best for the company, not the developers. For some people, development is only rewarding if they determine what to build.
- rmaccloy 17y agoThen they should work somewhere they can do that. Most likely that's a small company or a startup.
- mahmud 17y agoYes, and those people are called hobbyists. Even if you work for yourself, you decide which market to be in, and the market decides what you must build and when.
- raganwald 17y agoSure. I don't have some belief that all developers are incapable of product management. The very best, IMO, have strength in understanding what and why as well as how. But I do have a belief that in some cases, there is value for everyone in having a team with specialized roles. For all products there is a need for product management. And for some product teams, there should be a specialized product manager leading product management. Interestingly, the push to smaller start-ups and smaller teams does create more opportunities for developers to wear multiple hats. That's a good thing too.
- bmj 17y agoProduct management (at least where I am) also does a fair bit of marketing work. They tend to shape the overall product, but all technical decisions are made by engineering, not marketing.