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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 responsibi
by 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 agoThe 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 agoBack 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 agoIt'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.