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> You hire everyday great people. Each one needs to be great at something, obsessed by their craft, and driven by quality. You then put them together in a team,

> You hire everyday great people. Each one needs to be great at something, obsessed by their craft, and driven by quality. You then put them together in a team, without individual responsibilities, ensuring that there’s minimal overlap in areas of greatness. My current company is full of smart people, and (for a variety of reasons) we don't have product managers. It sucks. What happens is that the things a PM does do not get done. Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. So it doesn't get done. That's what happens there. At my last company, where I worked for about a year, I had three product managers. Two of them were fired because they were incompetent. One was really, really good (tremendous, in the parlance of this article). Our team still got more done in a year with a fraction of a good PM than my current company has gotten done in over two years without any PMs. I agree with one thing: there aren't enough good PMs to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good product manager scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre PMs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones. The problem we are dealing with is that the software industry did not scale linearly, it exploded exponentially, and it needed 100x the number of people wearing the PM hat than there were actual, bonafide PMs in the world.

lazyasciiart 3y ago
In my experience: working with a good or great PM is fun and productive. Working without a PM is ok. Working with a bad PM is somewhere between irritating and infuriating.
- semiquaver 3y ago
  Yep. A great PM is an amazing force multiplier. A bad PM drags the whole org down.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - esafak 3y ago
    So you're saying PMs are powerful.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  One of my most enjoyable experiences in regards to project management was working at a fortune 500 with an entire PM Org. The PMO grew out of IT where it was really formalized and then got its tentacles into all of the different orgs, sales, marketing, finance, etc. What an amazing force multiplier is right. Before IT would be sitting around waiting for Finance, now Finance was part of a global PM situation. Those PMs in the PMO knew their shit, they were realistic, they understood different strategies, they handled managing up and down, and ensuring everyone knew what they had to do. I wrote a linkedin review for my favorite PM and it's as follows: When I first met Rajitha, she was in the process of managing a company wide Windows 7 to 10 upgrade. As it turns out I was one of the last holdouts and was badly overdue. She was incessant! I hated it!. Finally, I gave into her demands and as these things go, I was pleasantly surprised how smoothly it went. Fast forward a few months and Rajitha was tasked to work along side myself and others on several complex tech merger/acquisition projects. Moving parts, moving people, the whole thing was a whirlwind held down by a few important people on the team, including her. My initial resentment was replaced with a new deeply held respect for her capabilities and skillset. She was amazingly diligent and focused, friendly and compassionate. If you're get a chance to work with Rajitha, count yourself among the lucky few! Sorry Rajitha, this recommendation is many years overdue. I was cleaning out my filing cabinet and found a stack of old Church & Dwight papers. A print out of "How I learned to stop worrying and love Direct To Consumer". A "Magneto", not "Magento" project cover, and a handwritten note -- left on my desk -- from you to make sure I followed up a task that was in my queue".
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  This applies to colleagues in all roles, especially the ones with more authority.
- Belopolye 3y ago
  Been having this lately with one of our clients, and my impression is that more than one of these PMs have their role as a placeholder while something else is found for them to do.
- snapetom 3y ago
  I had several companies where the PM were horrible, lost, and egotistical. I then ran into a company where the PM spent ten years as a developer for some popular game companies. That guy was worth his weight in gold. Development was so much smoother. I didn't have to spend time explaining why we couldn't do this or that. He'd nix bad ideas at higher levels before it even hit us. We were given ample warning on how we approach things ("Custom B will want this, and if box what you're doing now it'll be harder blah blah blah").
justinpombrio 3y ago
> Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on Ah, so that's what a product manager is supposed to do. When product managers were introduced at a company I worked at, they did very little of any of that. They certainly weren't speaking to customers. They weren't technical, so they weren't managing our Jira tickets. And "managing leadership" fell mostly on our managers' plates. I think the PMs mostly had meetings, talked to leadership, talked to engineers, wrote documents, and presided over the (now very long) sprint planning meetings. I can imagine product managers that did your list of things being a lot more valuable.
- jpatt 3y ago
  Sounds a lot more like a project or program manager than a product manager.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    Nevertheless it is the role called "product manager" at many companies.
  - moandcompany 3y ago
    And ironically it seem like the things you'd positively attribute here to a product manager used to be/are actually part of the scope of what was traditionally a "project manager" or "program manager." For example, look at the scope and definition of a "program manager" from Microsoft or the US DoD in the 1980s, 1990s+, as well as literature describing the role of a program manager and the discipline from that time.
    - lukevp 3y ago
      Why’s that ironic? There didn’t used to be frontend / backend / full stack devs either. As software engineering has matured and grown in scale, more subdivision of responsibilities is a natural outcome of that. We’re not all just directly writing code on mainframes and our customers aren’t just < 1k of users who directly call us on the phone if something goes wrong anymore, it’s millions of people using services 24x7 now. MS wasn’t making real-time collaboration systems and cloud sync in the 80s and 90s. They were making a stand-alone offline machine that barely could install device drivers and didn’t know what the internet was. Completely different products, and much simpler.
breckenedge 3y ago
Are they really that smart if they’re ignoring those things? Talking to users has always been on my list of things required for engineers. A decade+ of low-interest-rate fueled growth in the tech sector has meant a lot of us have succeeded just by showing up.
- twoodfin 3y ago
  In my experience, close technical customer-developer collaboration is incredibly valuable. What’s not great is customers arguing with engineers about which features to implement first or whether their bug report ought to have been backlogged. This is where a strong product role is essential.
  - breckenedge 3y ago
    I agree. Have the product team facilitate communications between customers and engineers and guide efforts towards development that has the biggest returns. Sadly I don’t really ever see it functioning that way anymore.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > Talking to users has always been on my list of things required for engineers. For any product of reasonable complexity, taking to users is something a PM should be spending ~1.5 days/wk on. Plus overseeing quantitative user research. If your engineers are all spending that kind of time on users, that's slowing down the amount of time writing software by a huge amount.
- esafak 3y ago
  In big companies there is not even a way for engineers to reach out to users. They come to you through feedback.
calvinmorrison 3y ago
Someone's gotta own the roadmap and prioritize the work queue, be it at a project level or updating the Microsoft project plan or the sprint. There's always a multitude of stakeholders. Devs, sales, marketing, ops, all have needs and idea. Someone must be the arbiter. I operate as principle on a project, and I have opinions, but I cannot set the roadmap alone
- sanderjd 3y ago
  If all you want is someone to do team-level project management toil, a line manager can do that (or hire them a part time assistant if they don't want to and you don't want to invest in better automation). This is not a whole career-level job.
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    I get the feeling you don't work on massively complex projects. We have loads of project managers where I work and I thank my stars we have every one of them. The coordination and planning required is ferocious for the work we need to deliver. It is not trivial and it would quickly fall apart without them.
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Some of what you described in the comment I replied to fits the description of complicated company-spanning project management - a valuable role I have typically seen referred to as "program management" - but some of it, the team level dealing-with-task-backlogs type stuff, are things that managers and team members can just do in the course of their work. But you're right that my comment focused only on the latter thing and ignored the former one. But setting that aside, there is certainly a personality thing at play here. If I worked where you work, I would probably be more skeptical of the value of all the time being put into project management, and if you worked at my favorite companies that I've worked at, you would probably feel like it's a poorly managed mess (I've had lots of coworkers who felt that way!). To some extent different folks just like different strokes, and that's one of the things that makes it really hard to do things that require lots of people to pull in the same direction.
charles_f 3y ago
> Our team still got more done in a year with a fraction of a good PM than my current company has gotten done in over two years without any PMs This is a great testimony. I think that stretching their capacity is a forcing function to stay high level and vision oriented, and avoid having PMs go too deep and start building up useless processes, or over-define features.
Spooky23 3y ago
Product Management is a hard job. You need to be technical enough to understand whats happening and have a bullshit detector, but high EQ enough to speak human. The dumb ones become sort-of project managers, tracking another set of books for tasks. The smart ones tend to deeply understand the business and move up or out. It's also a tough role to govern in that sometimes they get alot of credit for the work of others, or get no credit for anything and languish from a career pov. When this role is dumped into engineering, engineering management or general management, it weakens the engineering practice. If I need engineers, I need to select for that ability and frankly shield them from people on the outside. If the org requires that my teams handle interaction, now I'm hiring people with mixed skillsets in one org, which inevitably waters down the engineering side.
- shostack 3y ago
  I really hope you're not implying that project managers are or need to be less smart than product managers. They are different disciplines, and like any profession there's likely more people who are not good at it than people that are. But I've worked with great visionary product people and excellent project and program managers (and strive to be one every day myself). Neither could do the other's job well or effectively. They need to be laser focused on different things, and their EQ tends to be tuned to different wavelengths.
  - alienlid 3y ago
    Project managers usually don't need to know as much as product managers, or be as thoughtful as them to be a great value add. Project managers have a larger range of "acceptable" performance to be able to add value, so their job certainly is easier.
  - kcplate 3y ago
    Perhaps it was inelegantly put by the original commenter, but I think the gist is that the product managers who lack some of the important product management skills around vision, ability to be customer facing, and effective and articulate communications tend to work more like project managers—effective acting as tactical managers within a product as opposed to strategic ones for the product. We can define and name the roles all sorts of things (project manager, product owner, product manager, product marketing manager), but what it boils to is for any complex product there is a need for the management of the product at a holistic level and a need for management of a product at a granular level.
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marcosdumay 3y ago
> maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features Those are the marketing people. On most places they are stupidly completely focused on sales, but that's not ideal. Product management is also a task for those people, but singlemindly focusing them on PM is about as bad as doing that for sales. > manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation And those are management tasks. It makes no sense at all to give both sets of tasks to the same set of people.
huytersd 3y ago
PMs at most companies DO NOT play politics for resource management, the stakeholders are frequently just other departments within the company so there isn’t a lot of maintaining client relationships. TPMs with sales people are generally the ones that maintain relationships with clients. PMs do very little besides put out a high level requirement document that then truly gets fleshed out by the engineering team and the EMs.
snapetom 3y ago
Every thing you just said rings true. I went from 20 years engineering into engineering management, and took my first PM role last year. I took the role at a twenty year-old software company that's never had good product management, and the place is horrible. Over and over, the staff were pounded with "we are an engineering first company." Well, that means the engineering teams were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted and chase the shiny newest techs. There's 3.5 main products (really 4.5) each made from a different tech stack. There's another eight or so legacy products we have to support due to legacy demands. There's no inter-operability of standardization between products. Basically, there's no knowledge transfer, so the cost of development is through the roof. Twice this year, I had to explain to 20 year-tenure engineers that don't understand why it's a bad thing that one API is TLS 1.3 only, another is 1.x, and another doesn't even require TLS. Customers hate us. For my product, they literally wrote the marketing materials first, and let the engineers figure it out. One stage of my product takes Oracle data and puts it into parquet. The guys who did it did it in three different languages, two other DBs inbetween (MySQL AND PG), and was going to introduce Redis before I stopped the insanity. Everything is fragile and sucks. Thankfully, PE took over two years ago and we now have an ultimatum to make money or else. We are a twenty year old company that has never made money (we've been a cost center). Even if we don't meet it, I feel like the Universe will be better off without the travesties against software design that we created.
- aeternum 3y ago
  In my experience, the vast majority of PMs could not describe the difference between TLS 1.3 and 1.x. The problems you describe are legit but unless you have extremely technical product managers, hiring more PMs will only make the problem worse.
  - snapetom 3y ago
    I do believe that the traditional PM role/background should be considered obsolete, especially in software companies. Well-rounded engineers should be in these roles these days.
    - 3y ago
ryanSrich 3y ago
> Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers That’s what CX is for. > interview users to identify potential features That’s what designers are for. > manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation That’s what your lead/people manager is for. You don’t need a PM. You need an org chart.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  This might make sense for a company with one product, but for a larger company with many products, there's a lot of benefit in having one person per product who understands their product deeply, and can put on any of these hats when required to make the product better.
  - ryanSrich 3y ago
    Seems like you’d have a lot of overlap if what the PM is doing are the activities I listed, and you also employ the people I listed. Also, what engineer doesn’t understand the product deeply from both a technical and business perspective? Maybe a contract dev, or a new hire.
    - ako 3y ago
      It’s about responsibility, the PM is responsible for the success of a product. To achieve this he collaborates with all the parties you mention, but in the end the PM has the responsibility. Key in this is bringing together knowledge of the market, the competitors, the customer problems, the value of a solution to these customers, determining a roadmap that will lead towards a successful product, coordinate launch, service, support, and continuous monitoring of the state of the product (does it have the right features, what is the competition doing, what does sales need to effectively sell the product, etc). Reforge provides good training for product managers. This article provides a good overview of a role of a PM: https://www.reforge.com/previews/product/what-does-a-product-manager-do# https://www.reforge.com/previews/product/what-does-a-product...
      - 3y ago
liquidpele 3y ago
> Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. I’ve never met a PM that did any of that either ;)
xkcd-sucks 3y ago
yeah +1, I used to wear the product manager hat in an engineering role, while working with bad product managers, and so I thought the role was a grift at best. Also dealing with a herd of b2b clients sucked while trying to focus on doing the things we argued about / committed to doing. Then a good PM got hired, he actually understands what's going on / makes the effort to learn, and the life of "Engineering" roles got so much better. It may be significant in this case that product works with engineering in a kind of liason role and doesn't "dictate" much. Now program managers, it remains to be seen where their value comes from and I hope it does
- lostdog 3y ago
  Yeah, the problem is that accountability for PMs is usually missing. No one checks whether the PM is adding or removing effectiveness, so the good PMs go unrecognized and the bad ones keep siphoning energy from the project. Second, bad PMs just create unnecessary work for everyone around them. Everyone believes they just have to do what the PM says, and then suddenly you have a whole eng team contributing nothing.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I've legit seen PM's just move their own deadlines. Their decision, no attempt at justification, and I've seen it put everyone behind because they're waiting on the PM. I've legit seen a PM deliver a set of requirements 3 days before a deadline and blame the technical team for non-delivery (multiple times!). It sounds so ridiculous, and yet ... it happened.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  > Now program managers, it remains to be seen where their value comes from and I hope it does in my experience, they manage project managers for systems with a high degree of complexity, e.g. an aircraft, and the product managers work through them, instead of through project managers directly. Or they are themselves the product manager, just with different terminology depending on the industry
iamwil 3y ago
What made that one PM great? What did they do or what was their philosophy? The outcome was that they got the team to be more productive, but what was the input that differed from the other PMs?
- karaterobot 3y ago
  I can't really say. I'll describe some of the things I observed: they had incredibly good people skills with both customers and coworkers, they had the ability to ask incisive questions, and make good decisions with imperfect information, they context switched smoothly, they were well organized, and they made people excited about what they were working on. They also worked longer hours than anyone I know of at the company. This sounds like a combination of charisma, leadership, and drive, which makes sense as a pretty rare set of qualities for one person to have. ... And reading that, I think I left out that they were super nice, and everybody liked them.
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homarp 3y ago
>there aren't enough good PMs to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good product manager scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre PMs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones. there aren't enough good software developers to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good software developer scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre SWDevs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones.
nintendo1889 3y ago
So you're saying that the dude fired in 'Office Space' for bringing the specs from customers to engineers was necessary?
jokethrowaway 3y ago
> What happens is that the things a PM does do not get done. Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. So it doesn't get done. That's not what a PM does. You're missing leaders. Customer relations is generally under sales. Resource allocations, politics, that's engineering leadership stuff. Customer interviews is part of what a PM (or UXer) does. It's never been a critical pain point in any business I've been though. It's part of defining the product, oftentimes companies have a X years backlog of features users asked for and not enough time to build.
- fooster 3y ago
  Customer relations under sales? Who does that??
flockonus 3y ago
Want to corroborate, been through several companies and several PMs. The excellent ones are rare, and have disproportionate impact in the team's performance.
mitemte 3y ago
I can relate to this. At my previous company, the first PM our team had was absolutely amazing. She had an engineering background but transitioned to management ten or so years ago. At some point, she was promoted and the replacement PM, while good, was not as good. Fast-forward to my current company, the PMs here are absolutely shocking. The people they report to have no clue. It seems like every PM at my company has fallen upwards, as a result of newly hired PMs quitting shortly after they join. Engineers here are technically competent, but lack direction. Projects spin up before requirements have been defined, leading to massive losses of time. I’ve considered reaching out to my former company’s PMs to offer a referral, but it’d be a disservice to them.
bazmattaz 3y ago
As a PM I think this is spot on. The path to becoming a great PM is longer and arguably harder than becoming a great engineer. Like you say a lot of what makes a great PM comes from years of experience in a variety of roles and companies.
xialvjun 3y ago
> Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. Because the more you do, the more you are responsible for, but what you get doesn't increase. It's a question of profit distribution.

lazyasciiart 3y ago

In my experience: working with a good or great PM is fun and productive. Working without a PM is ok. Working with a bad PM is somewhere between irritating and infuriating.

semiquaver 3y ago
Yep. A great PM is an amazing force multiplier. A bad PM drags the whole org down.
- deleted 3y ago
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- esafak 3y ago
  So you're saying PMs are powerful.
calvinmorrison 3y ago
One of my most enjoyable experiences in regards to project management was working at a fortune 500 with an entire PM Org. The PMO grew out of IT where it was really formalized and then got its tentacles into all of the different orgs, sales, marketing, finance, etc. What an amazing force multiplier is right. Before IT would be sitting around waiting for Finance, now Finance was part of a global PM situation. Those PMs in the PMO knew their shit, they were realistic, they understood different strategies, they handled managing up and down, and ensuring everyone knew what they had to do. I wrote a linkedin review for my favorite PM and it's as follows: When I first met Rajitha, she was in the process of managing a company wide Windows 7 to 10 upgrade. As it turns out I was one of the last holdouts and was badly overdue. She was incessant! I hated it!. Finally, I gave into her demands and as these things go, I was pleasantly surprised how smoothly it went. Fast forward a few months and Rajitha was tasked to work along side myself and others on several complex tech merger/acquisition projects. Moving parts, moving people, the whole thing was a whirlwind held down by a few important people on the team, including her. My initial resentment was replaced with a new deeply held respect for her capabilities and skillset. She was amazingly diligent and focused, friendly and compassionate. If you're get a chance to work with Rajitha, count yourself among the lucky few! Sorry Rajitha, this recommendation is many years overdue. I was cleaning out my filing cabinet and found a stack of old Church & Dwight papers. A print out of "How I learned to stop worrying and love Direct To Consumer". A "Magneto", not "Magento" project cover, and a handwritten note -- left on my desk -- from you to make sure I followed up a task that was in my queue".
BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
This applies to colleagues in all roles, especially the ones with more authority.
Belopolye 3y ago
Been having this lately with one of our clients, and my impression is that more than one of these PMs have their role as a placeholder while something else is found for them to do.
snapetom 3y ago
I had several companies where the PM were horrible, lost, and egotistical. I then ran into a company where the PM spent ten years as a developer for some popular game companies. That guy was worth his weight in gold. Development was so much smoother. I didn't have to spend time explaining why we couldn't do this or that. He'd nix bad ideas at higher levels before it even hit us. We were given ample warning on how we approach things ("Custom B will want this, and if box what you're doing now it'll be harder blah blah blah").

justinpombrio 3y ago

> Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on Ah, so that's what a product manager is supposed to do. When product managers were introduced at a company I worked at, they did very little of any of that. They certainly weren't speaking to customers. They weren't technical, so they weren't managing our Jira tickets. And "managing leadership" fell mostly on our managers' plates. I think the PMs mostly had meetings, talked to leadership, talked to engineers, wrote documents, and presided over the (now very long) sprint planning meetings. I can imagine product managers that did your list of things being a lot more valuable.

jpatt 3y ago
Sounds a lot more like a project or program manager than a product manager.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Nevertheless it is the role called "product manager" at many companies.
- moandcompany 3y ago
  And ironically it seem like the things you'd positively attribute here to a product manager used to be/are actually part of the scope of what was traditionally a "project manager" or "program manager." For example, look at the scope and definition of a "program manager" from Microsoft or the US DoD in the 1980s, 1990s+, as well as literature describing the role of a program manager and the discipline from that time.
  - lukevp 3y ago
    Why’s that ironic? There didn’t used to be frontend / backend / full stack devs either. As software engineering has matured and grown in scale, more subdivision of responsibilities is a natural outcome of that. We’re not all just directly writing code on mainframes and our customers aren’t just < 1k of users who directly call us on the phone if something goes wrong anymore, it’s millions of people using services 24x7 now. MS wasn’t making real-time collaboration systems and cloud sync in the 80s and 90s. They were making a stand-alone offline machine that barely could install device drivers and didn’t know what the internet was. Completely different products, and much simpler.

breckenedge 3y ago

Are they really that smart if they’re ignoring those things? Talking to users has always been on my list of things required for engineers. A decade+ of low-interest-rate fueled growth in the tech sector has meant a lot of us have succeeded just by showing up.

twoodfin 3y ago
In my experience, close technical customer-developer collaboration is incredibly valuable. What’s not great is customers arguing with engineers about which features to implement first or whether their bug report ought to have been backlogged. This is where a strong product role is essential.
- breckenedge 3y ago
  I agree. Have the product team facilitate communications between customers and engineers and guide efforts towards development that has the biggest returns. Sadly I don’t really ever see it functioning that way anymore.
crazygringo 3y ago
> Talking to users has always been on my list of things required for engineers. For any product of reasonable complexity, taking to users is something a PM should be spending ~1.5 days/wk on. Plus overseeing quantitative user research. If your engineers are all spending that kind of time on users, that's slowing down the amount of time writing software by a huge amount.
esafak 3y ago
In big companies there is not even a way for engineers to reach out to users. They come to you through feedback.

calvinmorrison 3y ago

Someone's gotta own the roadmap and prioritize the work queue, be it at a project level or updating the Microsoft project plan or the sprint. There's always a multitude of stakeholders. Devs, sales, marketing, ops, all have needs and idea. Someone must be the arbiter. I operate as principle on a project, and I have opinions, but I cannot set the roadmap alone

sanderjd 3y ago
If all you want is someone to do team-level project management toil, a line manager can do that (or hire them a part time assistant if they don't want to and you don't want to invest in better automation). This is not a whole career-level job.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  I get the feeling you don't work on massively complex projects. We have loads of project managers where I work and I thank my stars we have every one of them. The coordination and planning required is ferocious for the work we need to deliver. It is not trivial and it would quickly fall apart without them.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Some of what you described in the comment I replied to fits the description of complicated company-spanning project management - a valuable role I have typically seen referred to as "program management" - but some of it, the team level dealing-with-task-backlogs type stuff, are things that managers and team members can just do in the course of their work. But you're right that my comment focused only on the latter thing and ignored the former one. But setting that aside, there is certainly a personality thing at play here. If I worked where you work, I would probably be more skeptical of the value of all the time being put into project management, and if you worked at my favorite companies that I've worked at, you would probably feel like it's a poorly managed mess (I've had lots of coworkers who felt that way!). To some extent different folks just like different strokes, and that's one of the things that makes it really hard to do things that require lots of people to pull in the same direction.

charles_f 3y ago

> Our team still got more done in a year with a fraction of a good PM than my current company has gotten done in over two years without any PMs This is a great testimony. I think that stretching their capacity is a forcing function to stay high level and vision oriented, and avoid having PMs go too deep and start building up useless processes, or over-define features.

Spooky23 3y ago

Product Management is a hard job. You need to be technical enough to understand whats happening and have a bullshit detector, but high EQ enough to speak human. The dumb ones become sort-of project managers, tracking another set of books for tasks. The smart ones tend to deeply understand the business and move up or out. It's also a tough role to govern in that sometimes they get alot of credit for the work of others, or get no credit for anything and languish from a career pov. When this role is dumped into engineering, engineering management or general management, it weakens the engineering practice. If I need engineers, I need to select for that ability and frankly shield them from people on the outside. If the org requires that my teams handle interaction, now I'm hiring people with mixed skillsets in one org, which inevitably waters down the engineering side.

shostack 3y ago
I really hope you're not implying that project managers are or need to be less smart than product managers. They are different disciplines, and like any profession there's likely more people who are not good at it than people that are. But I've worked with great visionary product people and excellent project and program managers (and strive to be one every day myself). Neither could do the other's job well or effectively. They need to be laser focused on different things, and their EQ tends to be tuned to different wavelengths.
- alienlid 3y ago
  Project managers usually don't need to know as much as product managers, or be as thoughtful as them to be a great value add. Project managers have a larger range of "acceptable" performance to be able to add value, so their job certainly is easier.
- kcplate 3y ago
  Perhaps it was inelegantly put by the original commenter, but I think the gist is that the product managers who lack some of the important product management skills around vision, ability to be customer facing, and effective and articulate communications tend to work more like project managers—effective acting as tactical managers within a product as opposed to strategic ones for the product. We can define and name the roles all sorts of things (project manager, product owner, product manager, product marketing manager), but what it boils to is for any complex product there is a need for the management of the product at a holistic level and a need for management of a product at a granular level.

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marcosdumay 3y ago

> maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features Those are the marketing people. On most places they are stupidly completely focused on sales, but that's not ideal. Product management is also a task for those people, but singlemindly focusing them on PM is about as bad as doing that for sales. > manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation And those are management tasks. It makes no sense at all to give both sets of tasks to the same set of people.

huytersd 3y ago

PMs at most companies DO NOT play politics for resource management, the stakeholders are frequently just other departments within the company so there isn’t a lot of maintaining client relationships. TPMs with sales people are generally the ones that maintain relationships with clients. PMs do very little besides put out a high level requirement document that then truly gets fleshed out by the engineering team and the EMs.

snapetom 3y ago

Every thing you just said rings true. I went from 20 years engineering into engineering management, and took my first PM role last year. I took the role at a twenty year-old software company that's never had good product management, and the place is horrible. Over and over, the staff were pounded with "we are an engineering first company." Well, that means the engineering teams were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted and chase the shiny newest techs. There's 3.5 main products (really 4.5) each made from a different tech stack. There's another eight or so legacy products we have to support due to legacy demands. There's no inter-operability of standardization between products. Basically, there's no knowledge transfer, so the cost of development is through the roof. Twice this year, I had to explain to 20 year-tenure engineers that don't understand why it's a bad thing that one API is TLS 1.3 only, another is 1.x, and another doesn't even require TLS. Customers hate us. For my product, they literally wrote the marketing materials first, and let the engineers figure it out. One stage of my product takes Oracle data and puts it into parquet. The guys who did it did it in three different languages, two other DBs inbetween (MySQL AND PG), and was going to introduce Redis before I stopped the insanity. Everything is fragile and sucks. Thankfully, PE took over two years ago and we now have an ultimatum to make money or else. We are a twenty year old company that has never made money (we've been a cost center). Even if we don't meet it, I feel like the Universe will be better off without the travesties against software design that we created.

aeternum 3y ago
In my experience, the vast majority of PMs could not describe the difference between TLS 1.3 and 1.x. The problems you describe are legit but unless you have extremely technical product managers, hiring more PMs will only make the problem worse.
- snapetom 3y ago
  I do believe that the traditional PM role/background should be considered obsolete, especially in software companies. Well-rounded engineers should be in these roles these days.
  - 3y ago

ryanSrich 3y ago

> Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers That’s what CX is for. > interview users to identify potential features That’s what designers are for. > manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation That’s what your lead/people manager is for. You don’t need a PM. You need an org chart.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
This might make sense for a company with one product, but for a larger company with many products, there's a lot of benefit in having one person per product who understands their product deeply, and can put on any of these hats when required to make the product better.
- ryanSrich 3y ago
  Seems like you’d have a lot of overlap if what the PM is doing are the activities I listed, and you also employ the people I listed. Also, what engineer doesn’t understand the product deeply from both a technical and business perspective? Maybe a contract dev, or a new hire.
  - ako 3y ago
    It’s about responsibility, the PM is responsible for the success of a product. To achieve this he collaborates with all the parties you mention, but in the end the PM has the responsibility. Key in this is bringing together knowledge of the market, the competitors, the customer problems, the value of a solution to these customers, determining a roadmap that will lead towards a successful product, coordinate launch, service, support, and continuous monitoring of the state of the product (does it have the right features, what is the competition doing, what does sales need to effectively sell the product, etc). Reforge provides good training for product managers. This article provides a good overview of a role of a PM: https://www.reforge.com/previews/product/what-does-a-product-manager-do# https://www.reforge.com/previews/product/what-does-a-product...
    - 3y ago

liquidpele 3y ago

xkcd-sucks 3y ago

yeah +1, I used to wear the product manager hat in an engineering role, while working with bad product managers, and so I thought the role was a grift at best. Also dealing with a herd of b2b clients sucked while trying to focus on doing the things we argued about / committed to doing. Then a good PM got hired, he actually understands what's going on / makes the effort to learn, and the life of "Engineering" roles got so much better. It may be significant in this case that product works with engineering in a kind of liason role and doesn't "dictate" much. Now program managers, it remains to be seen where their value comes from and I hope it does

lostdog 3y ago
Yeah, the problem is that accountability for PMs is usually missing. No one checks whether the PM is adding or removing effectiveness, so the good PMs go unrecognized and the bad ones keep siphoning energy from the project. Second, bad PMs just create unnecessary work for everyone around them. Everyone believes they just have to do what the PM says, and then suddenly you have a whole eng team contributing nothing.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I've legit seen PM's just move their own deadlines. Their decision, no attempt at justification, and I've seen it put everyone behind because they're waiting on the PM. I've legit seen a PM deliver a set of requirements 3 days before a deadline and blame the technical team for non-delivery (multiple times!). It sounds so ridiculous, and yet ... it happened.
ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
> Now program managers, it remains to be seen where their value comes from and I hope it does in my experience, they manage project managers for systems with a high degree of complexity, e.g. an aircraft, and the product managers work through them, instead of through project managers directly. Or they are themselves the product manager, just with different terminology depending on the industry

iamwil 3y ago

What made that one PM great? What did they do or what was their philosophy? The outcome was that they got the team to be more productive, but what was the input that differed from the other PMs?

karaterobot 3y ago
I can't really say. I'll describe some of the things I observed: they had incredibly good people skills with both customers and coworkers, they had the ability to ask incisive questions, and make good decisions with imperfect information, they context switched smoothly, they were well organized, and they made people excited about what they were working on. They also worked longer hours than anyone I know of at the company. This sounds like a combination of charisma, leadership, and drive, which makes sense as a pretty rare set of qualities for one person to have. ... And reading that, I think I left out that they were super nice, and everybody liked them.

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homarp 3y ago

>there aren't enough good PMs to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good product manager scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre PMs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones. there aren't enough good software developers to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good software developer scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre SWDevs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones.

nintendo1889 3y ago

So you're saying that the dude fired in 'Office Space' for bringing the specs from customers to engineers was necessary?

jokethrowaway 3y ago

> What happens is that the things a PM does do not get done. Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. So it doesn't get done. That's not what a PM does. You're missing leaders. Customer relations is generally under sales. Resource allocations, politics, that's engineering leadership stuff. Customer interviews is part of what a PM (or UXer) does. It's never been a critical pain point in any business I've been though. It's part of defining the product, oftentimes companies have a X years backlog of features users asked for and not enough time to build.

fooster 3y ago
Customer relations under sales? Who does that??

flockonus 3y ago

Want to corroborate, been through several companies and several PMs. The excellent ones are rare, and have disproportionate impact in the team's performance.

mitemte 3y ago

I can relate to this. At my previous company, the first PM our team had was absolutely amazing. She had an engineering background but transitioned to management ten or so years ago. At some point, she was promoted and the replacement PM, while good, was not as good. Fast-forward to my current company, the PMs here are absolutely shocking. The people they report to have no clue. It seems like every PM at my company has fallen upwards, as a result of newly hired PMs quitting shortly after they join. Engineers here are technically competent, but lack direction. Projects spin up before requirements have been defined, leading to massive losses of time. I’ve considered reaching out to my former company’s PMs to offer a referral, but it’d be a disservice to them.

bazmattaz 3y ago

As a PM I think this is spot on. The path to becoming a great PM is longer and arguably harder than becoming a great engineer. Like you say a lot of what makes a great PM comes from years of experience in a variety of roles and companies.

xialvjun 3y ago

> Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. Because the more you do, the more you are responsible for, but what you get doesn't increase. It's a question of profit distribution.