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I feel the "PM as CEO of the product" (aka, Product Owner) paradimng is completely wrong. PMs become very political fast, and often don't have qualms to underm

I feel the "PM as CEO of the product" (aka, Product Owner) paradimng is completely wrong. PMs become very political fast, and often don't have qualms to undermine other parts/products of the company in order to advance their own. Since often they are not the ones doing the hiring of engineers, they really don't care/have no qualms of the long term engineering needs (both personel/morale, and architecture). True company CEOs have to think about engineering personal needs all the time as recruiting is hard. PM/PO just don't care as they don't have to deal with true consequences of their decissions on the people that actually get the work done. I have seen narcistic PMs completely destroy team morales, and have engineers after engineers jus transfer out their teams. Also, Google PMs have earned a 'toxic' reputation in the industry. They are just too political. Might be ok for a large company, but they can be poison to smaller ones.

lumost 6y ago
I really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value. Typically the role ends up contending for scope with manager/engineer responsibilities or serving as a glorified task manager. The industry just doesn't have a good way to measure the performance of "product" and as such the PM can make good decisions or bad decisions and there is no measurement or mechanism to course correct. Occasionally I've seen a "product research" role where individuals focus on characterizing the problems customer's face, running user studies, or other analysis. This role provided immense value as it's easily a full-time job just talking to customers and bucketing their pain points.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  The PM I've worked with the most over the past few years is excellent acting as a sort of coordinator role, as you describe - maintaining relationships with UX and engineering across organizations, making sure UXR is involved, having an overarching vision, etc.
- topkai22 6y ago
  Back a bit (like a decade ago) when I still had PMs ours spent a lot of time on vendor and contract management, filtering/prioritizing cross team requests (of which we had many), and generally making sure that features got compelted in an order that kept our external partners satisfied. All important work, and work I was very glad to not have to do (except maybe the prioritization.)
- aliswe 6y ago
  It's good for team members to be able to refer important waypoint decisions to them, and for members of other teams to have a single point of contact. They can also do incident investigation/reporting, evaluate metrics and other useful responsibilities.
refulgentis 6y ago
Agree 100%. They play a very different, and very odd, ball game compared to what you have to play at a startup. 90% of the noise in my career is one tier up managers think they're doing what their managers manager wants, but really they're just being combative.
jariel 6y ago
PM is the 'centre of the product' : all the responsibility, but none of the direct power. It's an important job and when done well makes a huge difference. PM's have to have incredibly good 'EI' as they like to call it, it's a skill that is basically unrecognized by 1-dimensional engineers who are (sometimes) apparently so brilliant they cannot even have the self awareness to recognize their toxically inefficient communication abilities, as exemplified over and over in the article. (Edit: FYI this is a far too common theme in tech, wherein you find people that are legitimately great thinkers, and are recognized as such, but have incredibly poor communications skills and I feel that that the confidence derived from their legitimate brilliance, combined with a hint of power, makes them even more unwilling to grasp the fact.) I wonder what Google would have been with great organizational leadership? I guess we can be thankful that their style worked well enough to make Google good at what it is, and that I guess we're all a series of 'peaks and valleys' in terms of skills, but I'll never understand how bizarrely bad some folks are at not being able to grasp organizational, social, systems, leadership, abstract problems that don't map well to engineering style problems. Edit: Though it's a different domain of skills, and often harder to recognize material talent, great marketing teams are worth as least as much as great engineering teams in most situations.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Does characterizing an entire job family as being mentally deficient suggest low or high EI?
  - jariel 6y ago
    Does interpreting the descriptions '1-dimensional engineers' or 'it's common in tech' to imply 'an entire job family' suggest low or high reading comprehension? This thread is littered with examples lack of understanding of PM's (and other) roles, to the point wherein it's almost bigotry. It's understandable that many people don't know what 'marketing' or 'finance' is, but to project their ignorance, and couple it with with moralizing suggests exactly the kind of insufferable arrogance I'm pointing out. From this thread: "The value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer." (This one is wrong well past the point of being offensive) "After certain critical mass of PMs were achieved, things went only downhill. I" " I really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value." I started out as an Engineer and often felt this way as well, but having now played a variety of roles, I'm basically embarrassed at my own organizational illiteracy. It's common in tech and it's embarrassing for the 'job family'.

lumost 6y ago

I really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value. Typically the role ends up contending for scope with manager/engineer responsibilities or serving as a glorified task manager. The industry just doesn't have a good way to measure the performance of "product" and as such the PM can make good decisions or bad decisions and there is no measurement or mechanism to course correct. Occasionally I've seen a "product research" role where individuals focus on characterizing the problems customer's face, running user studies, or other analysis. This role provided immense value as it's easily a full-time job just talking to customers and bucketing their pain points.

refulgentis 6y ago
The PM I've worked with the most over the past few years is excellent acting as a sort of coordinator role, as you describe - maintaining relationships with UX and engineering across organizations, making sure UXR is involved, having an overarching vision, etc.
topkai22 6y ago
Back a bit (like a decade ago) when I still had PMs ours spent a lot of time on vendor and contract management, filtering/prioritizing cross team requests (of which we had many), and generally making sure that features got compelted in an order that kept our external partners satisfied. All important work, and work I was very glad to not have to do (except maybe the prioritization.)
aliswe 6y ago
It's good for team members to be able to refer important waypoint decisions to them, and for members of other teams to have a single point of contact. They can also do incident investigation/reporting, evaluate metrics and other useful responsibilities.

refulgentis 6y ago

Agree 100%. They play a very different, and very odd, ball game compared to what you have to play at a startup. 90% of the noise in my career is one tier up managers think they're doing what their managers manager wants, but really they're just being combative.

jariel 6y ago

PM is the 'centre of the product' : all the responsibility, but none of the direct power. It's an important job and when done well makes a huge difference. PM's have to have incredibly good 'EI' as they like to call it, it's a skill that is basically unrecognized by 1-dimensional engineers who are (sometimes) apparently so brilliant they cannot even have the self awareness to recognize their toxically inefficient communication abilities, as exemplified over and over in the article. (Edit: FYI this is a far too common theme in tech, wherein you find people that are legitimately great thinkers, and are recognized as such, but have incredibly poor communications skills and I feel that that the confidence derived from their legitimate brilliance, combined with a hint of power, makes them even more unwilling to grasp the fact.) I wonder what Google would have been with great organizational leadership? I guess we can be thankful that their style worked well enough to make Google good at what it is, and that I guess we're all a series of 'peaks and valleys' in terms of skills, but I'll never understand how bizarrely bad some folks are at not being able to grasp organizational, social, systems, leadership, abstract problems that don't map well to engineering style problems. Edit: Though it's a different domain of skills, and often harder to recognize material talent, great marketing teams are worth as least as much as great engineering teams in most situations.

ALittleLight 6y ago
Does characterizing an entire job family as being mentally deficient suggest low or high EI?
- jariel 6y ago
  Does interpreting the descriptions '1-dimensional engineers' or 'it's common in tech' to imply 'an entire job family' suggest low or high reading comprehension? This thread is littered with examples lack of understanding of PM's (and other) roles, to the point wherein it's almost bigotry. It's understandable that many people don't know what 'marketing' or 'finance' is, but to project their ignorance, and couple it with with moralizing suggests exactly the kind of insufferable arrogance I'm pointing out. From this thread: "The value creators (engineering/programming/creative/design/product) people have been pushed aside for the value extractors (finance/managers/marketing/oversight) and now the extractors are creating the product. It is a completely backwards setup that is causing products to suffer." (This one is wrong well past the point of being offensive) "After certain critical mass of PMs were achieved, things went only downhill. I" " I really haven't seen a tech company with a PM role which provided real value." I started out as an Engineer and often felt this way as well, but having now played a variety of roles, I'm basically embarrassed at my own organizational illiteracy. It's common in tech and it's embarrassing for the 'job family'.