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Agree 100%. Product managers are really business managers. Their goal is to ensure the software meets a business need that can help the firm developing it tran

Agree 100%. Product managers are really business managers. Their goal is to ensure the software meets a business need that can help the firm developing it translate the value it delivers into $ by application of a commercial model. Put another way - they define the WHAT and WHY, the HOW should be managed by their colleagues in Engineering.

politician 5y ago
You’re describing an analyst position. Product Management is a misnomer, IMO.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  The best PMs I knew were amazing analists. They wrote logs quiery processing code themselves to understand the product better instead of asking other engineers to do it. The only problem with them is that they don't stick around, but start their own startups.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    I keep ending up in that kind of a role. But since I’m higher paid than project managers I always get forced into doing development instead. So either I have to do my actual job after hours so I can help the company out. Or just do what I’m told and ignore the big picture. Would be nice to do it in a formal way about taking a massive pay cut
    - xiphias2 5y ago
      The thing is he wasn’t forced into a role of writing code. He was an APM at Google when Google didn’t have many PMs, and he was in a supporting role of helping teams to be organized and decide on the future of the product when we didn’t know whether some non-technical ideas should be executed upon or not and help with the non-technical part of the execution. Nowdays I felt just the opposite happening when I worked in Google Ads: PMs getting new feature requests from sales people and pushing down on us with strict timelines, even if we feel that that feature is not the best way to deliver better ads targeting for our customers. Probably you should just go to a smaller company with less PMs, where the PM/Eng ratio is optimal or too small (or go into higher management)

politician 5y ago

You’re describing an analyst position. Product Management is a misnomer, IMO.

xiphias2 5y ago
The best PMs I knew were amazing analists. They wrote logs quiery processing code themselves to understand the product better instead of asking other engineers to do it. The only problem with them is that they don't stick around, but start their own startups.
- treeman79 5y ago
  I keep ending up in that kind of a role. But since I’m higher paid than project managers I always get forced into doing development instead. So either I have to do my actual job after hours so I can help the company out. Or just do what I’m told and ignore the big picture. Would be nice to do it in a formal way about taking a massive pay cut
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    The thing is he wasn’t forced into a role of writing code. He was an APM at Google when Google didn’t have many PMs, and he was in a supporting role of helping teams to be organized and decide on the future of the product when we didn’t know whether some non-technical ideas should be executed upon or not and help with the non-technical part of the execution. Nowdays I felt just the opposite happening when I worked in Google Ads: PMs getting new feature requests from sales people and pushing down on us with strict timelines, even if we feel that that feature is not the best way to deliver better ads targeting for our customers. Probably you should just go to a smaller company with less PMs, where the PM/Eng ratio is optimal or too small (or go into higher management)