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As a PM, can I just say that your PM is fucking useless! Your PM is meant to be commercially minded, meaning they should understand the concept of compound int

As a PM, can I just say that your PM is fucking useless! Your PM is meant to be commercially minded, meaning they should understand the concept of compound interest. Every new feature you build, on average, increases the value of your product linearly. Every major piece of tech debt incurs reduced efficiency that compounds. It is extremely common in older systems for the incremental value of resolving tech-debt to be HIGHER than the incremental value of shipping "another feature".

jshen 4y ago
“Every new feature you build, on average, increases the value of your product linearly.” Why do you believe this? It doesn’t match my experience and I don’t think it’s a good way to think about it.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  Can you provide an explanation as to why it doesn't match your experience? There might very occasionally be a "killer feature", but that seems far more uncommon than features incrementally increasing the value of the product.
  - jshen 4y ago
    For starters, a lot of features add negative value. For most things, people don’t want everything and the kitchen sync thrown it. It confuses them and makes the product hard to use. If your model were true, any dummy off the street could achieve linear growth in a product by just continually adding more features. That’s not how it is. Second is what you hit on. Some features add exponential or greater value. This means that the value of new features does not fit a bell curve and reasoning about it with averages is a mistake.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  Where there are dependencies between features, effort increases more than linearly (even more than polynomial). If usefulness increases only linearly, that puts an upper bound on the meaningful size of an implementation.
  - jshen 4y ago
    I don’t believe the usefulness increases linearly. I think many features have a negative or zero value which makes it even worse!
    - iopq 4y ago
      negative can still be linear
      - jshen 4y ago
        You completely missed the point.
- llamaLord 4y ago
  IMO if an existing product is swinging between failed features and wild successes, chances are that it's being done based on luck (either good or bad), not any particularly great PM practise. Sure, startups and new products will either go gang busters or broke. But any decently mature product is almost always going for steady incremental improvement based on feedback and market shift. Now, I'm not saying they're achieving that... but that's what a decent PM should be aiming for.
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  You're right, value tends to multiply product value by a percentage, at a minimum. And can lead to a breakthrough in applications and sales. Which shouldn't be underestimated. Worth pointing out. But complexity (particularly if you can't squash dependencies) tends to go up by orders of power as sloppy code grows. I think that's their point.
mkoubaa 4y ago
My thoughts exactly. Extremely irresponsible leadership. I'd guess that they probably are just looking to use some year over year growth metric for the year or two they are at this job and then go hop to the next job with that on their CV.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
No offense intended, but most PMs I've met are fucking useless. Mybe they provide some value to the business that I'm not aware of? But they seem clueless about how to interact with an engineering team, and things like the product being a complete swiss-cheese shit-show that crashes when you blow on it wrong come as a complete shock to them. Every other kind of product has some basic metrics to determine its quality, yet the PMs seem clueless of anything that isn't in their Jira roadmap. But maybe I've just had bad luck...
- donmaq 4y ago
  >No offense intended, but most PMs I've met are fucking useless Beyond basic horse sense, technical credibility, customer outreach, market sense, & roadmap development by nurturing sheafs of competing priorities while constantly mindful of critical constraints... ...A PM has to make their management happy. Who increasingly isn't technical at all. Show me a 'pointless, clueless, idiotic' user story or epic, & I'll show you the result of PM negotiations with stakeholder(s) who asked (demanded) something far worse. EVERY non-technical %VP, C%% and VC I've met just Loves to say "it's just software; it can do anything"... & completely miss the bitter irony that statement should embody.
- llamaLord 4y ago
  To be fair... most PM's are fucking useless. There's fundamentally two types of PM's: A) People that were doing some other job (Engineer, BA, Project Manager) and over the course of a year or two, just naturally gravitated towards taking more and more of an ownership role over the actual business outcome that the team they were working on was trying to achieve. The job they do looks nothing at all like the one their job description says they do... but it seems to add a lot of value and a lot of people seem to want them to keep doing it. One day, they meet someone called a "Product Manager" and they go "holy shit... the stuff you do... that's what I do... am I a Product Manager?". -- These people make excellent PM's. B) People that were doing some other job (Engineer, BA, Project Manager) and over the course of three to four years, saw a small sub-set of their colleagues lead really meaningful projects, garner a fair bit of respect amongst their co-workers, probably end up getting paid more than they did, and eventually go on to working in roles called "Product Manager". These people decide that they too want to be respected, paid more, and lead meaningful projects... so they add the word "Product" to all their previous job titles on their CV, go do a 3 day Product Owner certification, and then start applying for PM roles. -- These people make fucking terrible PM's. They also tend to make up ~75% of PM's.

jshen 4y ago

“Every new feature you build, on average, increases the value of your product linearly.” Why do you believe this? It doesn’t match my experience and I don’t think it’s a good way to think about it.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
Can you provide an explanation as to why it doesn't match your experience? There might very occasionally be a "killer feature", but that seems far more uncommon than features incrementally increasing the value of the product.
- jshen 4y ago
  For starters, a lot of features add negative value. For most things, people don’t want everything and the kitchen sync thrown it. It confuses them and makes the product hard to use. If your model were true, any dummy off the street could achieve linear growth in a product by just continually adding more features. That’s not how it is. Second is what you hit on. Some features add exponential or greater value. This means that the value of new features does not fit a bell curve and reasoning about it with averages is a mistake.
someweirdperson 4y ago
Where there are dependencies between features, effort increases more than linearly (even more than polynomial). If usefulness increases only linearly, that puts an upper bound on the meaningful size of an implementation.
- jshen 4y ago
  I don’t believe the usefulness increases linearly. I think many features have a negative or zero value which makes it even worse!
  - iopq 4y ago
    negative can still be linear
    - jshen 4y ago
      You completely missed the point.
llamaLord 4y ago
IMO if an existing product is swinging between failed features and wild successes, chances are that it's being done based on luck (either good or bad), not any particularly great PM practise. Sure, startups and new products will either go gang busters or broke. But any decently mature product is almost always going for steady incremental improvement based on feedback and market shift. Now, I'm not saying they're achieving that... but that's what a decent PM should be aiming for.
Nomentatus 4y ago
You're right, value tends to multiply product value by a percentage, at a minimum. And can lead to a breakthrough in applications and sales. Which shouldn't be underestimated. Worth pointing out. But complexity (particularly if you can't squash dependencies) tends to go up by orders of power as sloppy code grows. I think that's their point.

mkoubaa 4y ago

My thoughts exactly. Extremely irresponsible leadership. I'd guess that they probably are just looking to use some year over year growth metric for the year or two they are at this job and then go hop to the next job with that on their CV.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

No offense intended, but most PMs I've met are fucking useless. Mybe they provide some value to the business that I'm not aware of? But they seem clueless about how to interact with an engineering team, and things like the product being a complete swiss-cheese shit-show that crashes when you blow on it wrong come as a complete shock to them. Every other kind of product has some basic metrics to determine its quality, yet the PMs seem clueless of anything that isn't in their Jira roadmap. But maybe I've just had bad luck...

donmaq 4y ago
>No offense intended, but most PMs I've met are fucking useless Beyond basic horse sense, technical credibility, customer outreach, market sense, & roadmap development by nurturing sheafs of competing priorities while constantly mindful of critical constraints... ...A PM has to make their management happy. Who increasingly isn't technical at all. Show me a 'pointless, clueless, idiotic' user story or epic, & I'll show you the result of PM negotiations with stakeholder(s) who asked (demanded) something far worse. EVERY non-technical %VP, C%% and VC I've met just Loves to say "it's just software; it can do anything"... & completely miss the bitter irony that statement should embody.
llamaLord 4y ago
To be fair... most PM's are fucking useless. There's fundamentally two types of PM's: A) People that were doing some other job (Engineer, BA, Project Manager) and over the course of a year or two, just naturally gravitated towards taking more and more of an ownership role over the actual business outcome that the team they were working on was trying to achieve. The job they do looks nothing at all like the one their job description says they do... but it seems to add a lot of value and a lot of people seem to want them to keep doing it. One day, they meet someone called a "Product Manager" and they go "holy shit... the stuff you do... that's what I do... am I a Product Manager?". -- These people make excellent PM's. B) People that were doing some other job (Engineer, BA, Project Manager) and over the course of three to four years, saw a small sub-set of their colleagues lead really meaningful projects, garner a fair bit of respect amongst their co-workers, probably end up getting paid more than they did, and eventually go on to working in roles called "Product Manager". These people decide that they too want to be respected, paid more, and lead meaningful projects... so they add the word "Product" to all their previous job titles on their CV, go do a 3 day Product Owner certification, and then start applying for PM roles. -- These people make fucking terrible PM's. They also tend to make up ~75% of PM's.