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In my time at Google I never understood on what criteria young PMs were hired. The company would regularly reject engineering candidates who had very successfu
by khazhoux 6y ago
In my time at Google I never understood on what criteria young PMs were hired. The company would regularly reject engineering candidates who had very successful solo projects because they didn't correctly answer the generic Comp Sci and how-do-you-scale-search questions, but at the same time the vast majority of PMs I encountered were just a year or two out of undergrad, and had never built a product, never launched a product, never demonstrated any aptitude for connecting with users. They were certainly personable, and overall were good communicators, but not --as a rule-- inventive or imaginative.
- enos_feedler 6y agoThis was one of my biggest frustrations that weighed on my decision to leave the company. The PMs I worked directly with rarely felt a true sense of ownership and pride over the roadmap and evolution of value to users. They never bothered to think how the future was evolving. They seemed to be brought in on pretty regular rotation with no attachment. They were mostly interested in seeing product management as some kind of accounting/ROI management problem. They would go through a long list of line items and try to assign priority and tried to remove as many things as they could. They also wanted to make the few things they did commit to seem much bigger than they actually were. I most directly saw this with Android Camera framework and APIs. The worst part was sitting through feedback meetings from developers. Instead of truly listening and challenging their current views, they would try to fit the feedback to their current view and dismiss a lot of really important insights from the field.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoGiven Googles poor track record for creating new products in recent years this all makes sense.
- koolba 6y agoGoogle has a great track record for creating new products. It’s the longevity and overall follow through that is lacking.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoMany Google "products" have come through acquisitions. The work product of others placed under a Google moniker.
- stefan_ 6y agoAnd many of their most successful products were 20% engineer inventions.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions
- enos_feedler 6y agoYes and in Android, where I observed this, it's going to some of the worst. It was a defensive move instead of true insight into what mobile look like. Perhaps the one driving differentiated vision might be "open". But as the OEM world increasingly moves towards a collection of Apples, longevity and followthrough are going to be tough to deliver. I still think there is some great product muscle in areas like Google Cloud. Despite being highly competitive with AWS and Azure, at least it's born out of a desire to share their own best infrastructure with the rest of the world. They should be doing this and feels important. Despite Google shuttering the game studio, I think products like Stadia are going to do well, built on the backbone of Youtube (casting streams or jumping into existing with your game) and Assistant (in game tutorials/help). When you are as big as Google some things are just going to be sputtering and unfortunately that was in the area I worked.
- snarfy 6y agoI mean, how many of us have dozens of half finished projects sitting around before it gets dumped for the next new shiny?
- bitcharmer 6y agoMost of us, I guess. But we don't launch those products to millions of users before we loose interest in them.
- Fordec 6y agoAfter doing mobile dev that has worked directly with the Android Camera API, it shows. I believe Snapchat notoriously was held up, back in the day at least, in rolling out Android features due to how much of a mess it was. Bluetooth has traditionally been another disaster zone. The low level APIs for interfacing with hardware shows a distinct lack of care for how the developer experiences things. And on a meta level, either I'm improving way more than I give myself credit for, but whenever I dive under the hood these days of certain Android libraries, the underlying quality and elegance of design seems to be decreasing over time and questioning how certain PMs let some instances of kludges past their review process that I, who will never, ever pass a Google interview process, would reject completely out of hand if someone put them in a PR to a codebase I managed. I'm noticing a certain amount of increasing Reflection usage bleeding into libraries these days that you would expect at a widget factory who lost the original source code, not a FAANG company inside their own core platform. It betrays either a loss of control of the situation by product managers, or, more likely, teams are increasingly not able to interact across project departments and collaboration is being replaced with increasing inter-team hostility/indifference.
- tyingq 6y agoI don't know anything about the inner workings of Google. However, if they were all mostly doing that kind of thing, it's probably what was expected and rewarded by whoever they worked for. If, for example, finishing projects on the original projected timeline is heavily weighted...you get the ruthless scope cutting you mention. Or, if compensation is tied to team size, you get empire building.
- enos_feedler 6y agoYes thats exactly it. the problem was in OKR setting and expectations. The PMs got unfairly rewarded for things that didn't matter. Android releases on a regular cadence and I think just meeting the release deadline with some set of namable new things was enough to receive the bulk of performance compensation. It didn't matter if app developers were still jumping through painful hoops to get Camera detection, usage, debugging, etc working across a highly fragmented ecosystem of chips and sensors. It wasn't part of the OKR to fix it, and it certainly wasn't fixable within an OKR planning cycle.
- telltruth 6y agoMicrosoft went exactly the same route. After certain critical mass of PMs were achieved, things went only downhill. I am not saying engineers somehow are superior but the fact is that there is no real hiring criteria for PMs so overall talent pool gets very diluted very quickly. Good PMs like Spolesky are worth gold but there is no way to identify them during interviews. Now that Google has 6 versions of chat programs, GMail UX that is mess, Maps that are stagnant - you can see same outcome that Microsoft saw.
- ALittleLight 6y agoOnce a PM and I were working on something and we came to a task where we needed to spend an hour or two repeatedly clicking through some boilerplate webforms in our own product, for an incredibly stupid reason, at the behest of a significant customer. I shrugged and told the PM I would do it, and I was kind of looking forward to listening to a podcast and mindlessly clicking. She told me that I had a valuable skill set and it wasn't a good use of my time and that she would do it instead. I really wanted to ask, but thought better of it, "Don't you have a valuable skill set?" I guess the charitable interpretation is that she wanted to listen to a podcast (or equivalent). The less charitable interpretation is that she didn't value her own contributions.
- jamesmishra 6y agoI cannot know what your colleague truly meant, but there are many more explanations than the two that you mentioned. She may simply have offered to do the task out of kindness to you--not out of a belief in her own inferiority. Alternatively, perhaps she thinks you wouldn't pay attention to the task and she would.
- discordance 6y agoCould also be a case of low ego or imposter syndrome
- ZephyrBlu 6y agoThis kind of sounds like what a PM should be doing though. Remove distractions and let you focus on your work.
- smsm42 6y agoMaybe she had a free hour. That happens. I usually have a bunch of things being worked on, but from time to time the stars align in a weird way and I'm waiting for some inputs or for some long-term process to finish and may have a couple of hours where I don't have anything specific to do. I won't start anything major because I'd have to drop it soon then, but I may go read some articles, or listen to a talk, or update docs, or clean up some minor tech debt. Or maybe do some stupid stuff that needs to be done and can be done by anybody, but this time it's me. Maybe that was such a moment for her, nothing to do with skills. Even very skilled people sometimes have to do some boring work.
- paxys 6y agoThis dysfunction is apparent even externally, considering they have never had a cohesive long-term vision for a single product line.
- anonytrary 6y agoMost PMs at most big companies are not that way. They just build what they're told and make incremental improvements on whatever it is they built. Big companies are slow, most people working at big companies do not care much about their problem spaces. You can tell in the quality and usefulness of the products, especially for software. Hardware seems different.
- franze 6y agoI worked with PMs that had 2+ years Google PMs on their CV. They did not understand the basics of project management (who does what when and who does need what when) but made pretty slides. It completely deillusioned me of what kind of company Google must be.
- mruniverse 6y agoIt's draining working for PMs. There were a couple of times I got to work for a more senior dev and it's like you have another job (a good one).