3 ms·

To be fair good product designers do like 85% of PM's job. Design is not what it looks like, it's how it works.

ativzzz 3y ago
It just depends if you hire more designers or PMs. Doing designs is a lot of work, but so is talking to customers and developing high level product strategy - talking internally about what needs to be done. If your designers are doing the latter two, that means they're not spending nearly enough time talking to customers
- the_mar 3y ago
  how are designers making designs without talking to customers? Who are they designing it for then? Please don't come at me with "but... requirements", good design requires you to understand your user. People are bad at articulating what they actually want and if your PM is not a designer (in a sense of comprehension and problem solving, not Figma proficiency) the "requirements" are going to be some uninspired platitudes. What you refer to as "doing designs" is actually just pixel pushing, which has absolutely no place unless and until you figure out the functionality
yawnxyz 3y ago
At Microsoft many years ago, they used to put a lot of product design work on PMs (who didn't have the training or time / bandwidth to do that well). I think this was the Ballmer era...
- the_mar 3y ago
  Personally, I think a PM that doesn't have training / skills to do product design work is a glorified note-taker. I don't necessarily mean the implementation skills of "making screens", but arguably that skill is the easiest to obtain. Otherwise you end up with a weird division of labor, where the PM actually does all the creative design work and the designer is an implementation monkey, which I don't know any designers that are good that would want that job
  - yawnxyz 3y ago
    Yep exactly what happened at Microsoft, hence Vista and all the other products that spilled out of Ballmer's tenure like trash out of an overturned dump truck
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Been saying that for a while. "A PM is a glorified secretary"

It just depends if you hire more designers or PMs. Doing designs is a lot of work, but so is talking to customers and developing high level product strategy - talking internally about what needs to be done. If your designers are doing the latter two, that means they're not spending nearly enough time talking to customers

the_mar 3y ago
how are designers making designs without talking to customers? Who are they designing it for then? Please don't come at me with "but... requirements", good design requires you to understand your user. People are bad at articulating what they actually want and if your PM is not a designer (in a sense of comprehension and problem solving, not Figma proficiency) the "requirements" are going to be some uninspired platitudes. What you refer to as "doing designs" is actually just pixel pushing, which has absolutely no place unless and until you figure out the functionality

yawnxyz 3y ago

At Microsoft many years ago, they used to put a lot of product design work on PMs (who didn't have the training or time / bandwidth to do that well). I think this was the Ballmer era...

the_mar 3y ago
Personally, I think a PM that doesn't have training / skills to do product design work is a glorified note-taker. I don't necessarily mean the implementation skills of "making screens", but arguably that skill is the easiest to obtain. Otherwise you end up with a weird division of labor, where the PM actually does all the creative design work and the designer is an implementation monkey, which I don't know any designers that are good that would want that job
- yawnxyz 3y ago
  Yep exactly what happened at Microsoft, hence Vista and all the other products that spilled out of Ballmer's tenure like trash out of an overturned dump truck
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Been saying that for a while. "A PM is a glorified secretary"