3 ms·

Principal Product Manager here. I agree... Way too many people took advantage of this role over the last 20 years, IMO, in the name of FOMO. Too many I avoided

Principal Product Manager here. I agree... Way too many people took advantage of this role over the last 20 years, IMO, in the name of FOMO. Too many I avoided or fired because they just could never, never, understand the tech. I wont hire a PM now that isn't also a contributor during work or in their spare time. Not only should they be excellent leads, they should be able to get down and dirty actually move the needle, design something, write code. Run their own damn prototype and test. A big part of my current role is just empowering more Jr PMs to contribute more by educating them on certain skills, but it doesn't scale and none of them have the drive to study the subjects on their own. I envision a shift coming. Ive never subscribed to the bullshit, but Im personally moving away from much of the "PM activities" and spending more time on my original skills, design and engineering...

dieselgate 3y ago
Agree PMs should be technically capable. It's an increasingly frustrating issue on my current team: the PM does nothing and is routinely caught between technical contributors and stakeholders above. I now think engineer/s should just take over the PM role. edit: "nothing" meaning they just schedule meetings
- spacecadet 3y ago
  I don't believe it should be a monoculture role. I think it should be held by generalist contributors like me. I cut my teeth and at a great cost/time to me, learned many skills professionally. I don't want some punk Software Engineer who thinks they are god coming in and making a mess of my hardware or my infrastructure.
blululu 3y ago
Yes. Fundamentally product manager is a generalist role that spans across disciplines. These roles are always hard to fill because they don't have a standard template. Moreover, at the point when an organization attempts to formalize such a role, the culture has likely reached a point where people don't even know what they ought to be looking for in the first place. We frequently assume that if someone has no specialty then they must be a generalist. There is the freshly minted MBAs who did a two year consulting stint out of school who is familiar with many topics though they are clearly not an expert. There is the person with a degree in the humanities who claims that they are a generalist just because they can't do math and never tried to learn javascript. There is the engineer who is not very talented and tries to push their way into management since they are great at scheduling meetings when everyone else was too busy doing the actual work. This is not to say that an MBA or an MFA are not great degrees. It is simply to say that they are not enough on their own. One needs to actually do things - a lot of things. Real generalists developed their skill set through their own hard work over a long period of time.

dieselgate 3y ago

Agree PMs should be technically capable. It's an increasingly frustrating issue on my current team: the PM does nothing and is routinely caught between technical contributors and stakeholders above. I now think engineer/s should just take over the PM role. edit: "nothing" meaning they just schedule meetings

spacecadet 3y ago
I don't believe it should be a monoculture role. I think it should be held by generalist contributors like me. I cut my teeth and at a great cost/time to me, learned many skills professionally. I don't want some punk Software Engineer who thinks they are god coming in and making a mess of my hardware or my infrastructure.

blululu 3y ago

Yes. Fundamentally product manager is a generalist role that spans across disciplines. These roles are always hard to fill because they don't have a standard template. Moreover, at the point when an organization attempts to formalize such a role, the culture has likely reached a point where people don't even know what they ought to be looking for in the first place. We frequently assume that if someone has no specialty then they must be a generalist. There is the freshly minted MBAs who did a two year consulting stint out of school who is familiar with many topics though they are clearly not an expert. There is the person with a degree in the humanities who claims that they are a generalist just because they can't do math and never tried to learn javascript. There is the engineer who is not very talented and tries to push their way into management since they are great at scheduling meetings when everyone else was too busy doing the actual work. This is not to say that an MBA or an MFA are not great degrees. It is simply to say that they are not enough on their own. One needs to actually do things - a lot of things. Real generalists developed their skill set through their own hard work over a long period of time.