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I've become pretty skeptical about "Product Management" as a function. I feel like it's one of those ideas that's cargo-culted from Google without anywhere near

• zingar 4y ago
  So much snake oil. So many people have “shifted from product owner to product management“, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who can tell me the difference.
  • VinLucero 4y ago
    Fair discourse: I have worked at Google, Credit Karma and now Sivo (YC W21) as a (technical) program and product manager. I know for a fact that Google doesn’t actually have “Product Owner” as a role in their org chart. At Google, the separation is: Product Manager (Vision), which is focused on gathering business needs and driving the Feature Roadmap. Program Manager (Execution), which focuses on finding ways to unblock delivery of the vision with cross-functional teams, such as getting designs, legal approvals, etc. I recently experienced a Product Owner for the first time when hiring one at Sivo (YC W21). It seems like Product Owners exist to accelerate the Roadmap vision into Epics and Stories in solutions like JIRA so product visions are more actionable by engineering. Similarly, while not a role at Google, I have heard that some MegaCorps will have “project managers” that often report up into Program Managers. This is similar to the product owner and product manager relationship. Hope that helps!
    • ketzo 4y ago
      How do Engineering Managers work alongside those two roles?
      • singron 4y ago
        This is how you end up with 8 bosses like in office space. EM, TL, ATL, PM, PgM are all telling you what to do and asking for status updates. I wish there was someone to liase and multiplex all that, but I think they all think that's what their job is.
        • School-Cotton 4y ago
          > I wish there was someone to liase and multiplex all that In theory, that is the EM’s job.
      • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        The Product person spends all their time understanding the market and figuring what to build, who to target, how to work with marketing/sales, how to price it, what the competition is doing, syncing with other PMs to make sure everything is coherent, communicating around the org to people who need to know, answering questions from legal/accounting/sales etc. The engineering manager can focus on how to build it, who should work on what, engineer's careers, technical challenges, team stuff and many other things depending on the circumstances, and the program manager can project manage, focus on syncing eng efforts across teams, moving blockers etc. Those three things are an enormous amount of work, each one. If anyone tries to do more than one they will suck. There are exceptions... some people are able to pull it off. Those people should go start a company and not be PMs. At least in my experience, good engineering managers had a lot of input into the product function because they were paying attention to the customers and had insight into what could be built - part of the reason they are a manager is they have more than eng skills. The PM and EM need a good relationship and usually do, at least at Google. The program manager has less input to what to build. Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. Bad PMs annoy everyone and give the function a bad rep, good PMs come in and are treated poorly (due to bad function rep) or have silly expectations put on them due to a lack of understanding of the function, and leave.
        • nicoburns 4y ago
          > Outside of Google the product management function does indeed seem to be... pretty awful for everyone involved. If the best product managers are at google, then that's very damning, given that Google are notorious for having awful product sense. I'm not convinced that's true though. I've worked with good product people at small companies.
    • zingar 4y ago
      Thank you! That is the first coherent explanation I've seen. Reviewing these in the light of agile software development in the form of scrum and kanban: I'm struck by how close your definition of Product Manager is to the idea of Product Owner: a person who understands the interests of the users and the business and prioritises work in order of bang for buck. Someone who is really good with the 80/20 rule. It also explains to me why no-one can explain the transition from PO to PM: the people who think there is any difference did not really understand the PO role. Dividing work up, organising an issue tracker etc. are tangential activities that POs frequently perform, but they can also be performed by anyone else on the team. I'd argue that when you reduce the "owner" to the person whose only job is these tangential things, you actually hurt the team by taking initiative away from engineers. Engineers should be capable of organising their own work as a team, and should be considered junior if they can't. I first encountered the ideas of programme manager and project manager in the pre-agile world (from orgs that liked PRINCE/2). It makes sense to me that the programme manager role exists now in a larger team of teams of teams environment. The agile manifesto was about small teams and didn't really have anything to say about larger projects. A hat tip to scrum masters who seem to have been sidelined in the product management world, because their (no-less important, when done well) role was to unblock in exactly the way that you describe a programme manager doing (plus understanding people and improving collaboration). The main difference I can see here is that a scrum master was usually responsible for one team only, which was probably too little authority to compete with the ambition of product people and the disinterest of business executives. Hence no surprise that the role has disappeared. The "project manager" role isn't something I've encountered recently, but seems like what it always was (what you get when developers aren't/cannot be trusted to take initiative). It sounds like a more honest title than watered-down "product owner": these orgs never understood agile or product and just gave their project managers a new title.
  • acedTrex 4y ago
    I feel like the difference is company dependent, but in my experience the difference, or at least the difference that is wanted is that a product manager implies a manager of both the end result and the process by which that end result is met. A product owner is someone who decides WHERE the product goes, but has no say in how the engineers make that happen. Its their job to set priorities and keep the product going forward but they have no tech management authority.
• cbsmith 4y ago
  Product Management certainly predates Google by at least a generation. Indeed, Google is notoriously skeptical on the product management role and requires their product managers to have a technical background to at least some degree.
  • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    Google isn't skeptical of the product management role. They are skeptical that non-technical people can do it well. And that's mostly right, but there are exceptions.
    • cbsmith 4y ago
      When I look at the ratio between engineers and product managers, it seems they are skeptical about the role.
      • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        By that logic they skeptical of the VP role, CEO, Staff software engineer, more.
        • cbsmith 4y ago
          They do seem to be pretty skeptical of the VP role as well. ;-) I wouldn't say that about CEO or Staff Software engineer role though.
          • danielmarkbruce 4y ago
            There will always be less VPs than others, less PMs than engineers, less CEOs than everything else. It doesn't say anything.
            • cbsmith 4y ago
              <pedantic>That's not exactly correct. What is true is there will be fewer VPs than people they manage, fewer PMs than engineers, and fewer CEOs than almost everything else. ;-) </pedantic> Given that principle though, what do you think I meant by "When I look at the ratio between engineers and product managers, it seems they are skeptical about the role."? Do you really think I meant that since there are fewer product managers than engineers, I've concluded they're skeptical about the role?
• yibg 4y ago
  I think it depends on the product. If it's something that's fairly common and easy to grasp for the typical engineer then I agree. If it's something very domain specific (accounting, legal etc), then I think having a PM that has knowledge / expertise in that area makes a lot of sense. You don't want the engineers spending months / years learning about accounting principles or legal nuances.
  • sarchertech 4y ago
    I have never worked for a company where the PM was an honest to goodness subject matter expert. There have been PMs who learned a lot about the domain, the same way good experienced software devs do. But the majority of the time it feels like we just stuck a middleman in between engineering and the real subject matter experts.
• shostack 4y ago
  Counterpoint: I've seen the fallout when you get teams of very smart technical people who don't have the product management skill set. They: - Prioritize building the wrong thing - Don't prioritize customer interviews and think they know what is best for users, which can be a double whammy when you consider social skills are not always a strength of very technical people - Don't understand the role marketing or sales plays in the success of the product because of their limited understanding of those roles and preconceived notions that prevent them from collaborating effectively I've also met plenty of supposed technical people who fail to ship code or grasp some of the technical concepts for the work they are supporting.
• CipherThrowaway 4y ago
  Product management is clearly a legitimate function. A good PM embedded in a cross-functional team can make a night and day difference. Problems seem to begin when product management is externalized from the product teams, put into dedicated teams or departments. The role is seen as something like "telling the devs what to build and making sure they build it."