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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

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.

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.