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My experience with product managers is that they wedge themselves between the business and the technical teams and then wield political power while doing very l

My experience with product managers is that they wedge themselves between the business and the technical teams and then wield political power while doing very little. I'm currently trying desperately to get two different PM's to talk to each other so we can be consistent with permissions sets across two different projects. Both projects use the same set of API's. One of the PM's is basically incognito, the other has actively been trying to avoid doing any of the work. But the technical teams will get blamed for this, I know because I've watched these same PM's blame the technical teams for their own failings on other projects. I'm with the article, fuck Product Managers, grab a senior developer and let him or her spend part of their time interfacing with business while also teaching the younger developers the skills necessary to do it. The problem isn't that their responsibilities aren't useful, it's that there shouldn't be a role dedicated to their responsibilities, it immediately draws moats around everything and suddenly the need for communication and collaboration jumps through the roof because the people in that role don't understand the technology the way a senior developer would. There's a segment of the developer population that wants to put their head in the sand, do their job, and clock out. These developers are low value and will never be able to take on the role described above.

FireBeyond 3y ago
> My experience with product managers is that they wedge themselves between the business and the technical teams and then wield political power while doing very little. There's a large number of companies where the company is the one wedging the PMs there. My view is that a PMs job should include (but not be limited to) diplomacy, negotiation and facilitation. But if your heart isn't in that (and it can be easy to become disheartened), then it easily becomes "politics", and the worst parts of politics, at that.
foota 3y ago
I wonder if part of the gap here is about whether a company is B2B or B2C. In my experience at a largely B2B company, the product managers are people that aren't necessarily technical, but have experience in the relevant domain and meet with customers to find out what they need and coordinate launches etc., with them. I don't know if the same role makes as much sense at a B2C company, so maybe people are B2Bs see their value and people at B2C companies don't as much?
- steveBK123 3y ago
  I've seen shops hire product managers for INTERNAL customer facing apps, and then have the PMs basically not talk to those customers. They did instead talk extensively to product & tech management as well as the c-suite. So tech people (even IC non-leads) end up on weekly calls with various internal stakeholders that the PM can't make (literally this is your job dude) and take the brunt of all the feedback/relationship management/etc with the trickier ones. The worst was when he said he would take the weekly calls with Asia users but wanted to pre-meet with me first and ask I ride along with the weekly user call for a while. So we would pre-meet and then he would ghost on the user call so I end up having two calls instead of one. Just cargo cult CTOs reading too many books and not actually looking at the evidence in front of their eyes.
- braza 3y ago
  Same experience, but I have one hypothesis: in B2C the “client” after some point become some abstract entity where people ship code/product to. A great PM can talk with those masses and extract exactly what needs to be done. This is a very hard skill. In B2C the customer is way clearer and the relationship is everything and it’s quite hard a bad professional hide for long.
- j45 3y ago
  The issue too often is business analysts wanting to be product managers when technical analysts may enable to learn the role better. TA’s will devour the BA’s because tech folks can learn business easier than the other way around. Still, BA’s can learn the details and get more fluent in working with them.
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  My experience with B2B PMs is that exactly one that I've worked with was amazing and the rest were just an awful intermediary that added a day of latency to any communication with our contact at customers and often managed to mangle things too.

FireBeyond 3y ago

> My experience with product managers is that they wedge themselves between the business and the technical teams and then wield political power while doing very little. There's a large number of companies where the company is the one wedging the PMs there. My view is that a PMs job should include (but not be limited to) diplomacy, negotiation and facilitation. But if your heart isn't in that (and it can be easy to become disheartened), then it easily becomes "politics", and the worst parts of politics, at that.

foota 3y ago

I wonder if part of the gap here is about whether a company is B2B or B2C. In my experience at a largely B2B company, the product managers are people that aren't necessarily technical, but have experience in the relevant domain and meet with customers to find out what they need and coordinate launches etc., with them. I don't know if the same role makes as much sense at a B2C company, so maybe people are B2Bs see their value and people at B2C companies don't as much?

steveBK123 3y ago
I've seen shops hire product managers for INTERNAL customer facing apps, and then have the PMs basically not talk to those customers. They did instead talk extensively to product & tech management as well as the c-suite. So tech people (even IC non-leads) end up on weekly calls with various internal stakeholders that the PM can't make (literally this is your job dude) and take the brunt of all the feedback/relationship management/etc with the trickier ones. The worst was when he said he would take the weekly calls with Asia users but wanted to pre-meet with me first and ask I ride along with the weekly user call for a while. So we would pre-meet and then he would ghost on the user call so I end up having two calls instead of one. Just cargo cult CTOs reading too many books and not actually looking at the evidence in front of their eyes.
braza 3y ago
Same experience, but I have one hypothesis: in B2C the “client” after some point become some abstract entity where people ship code/product to. A great PM can talk with those masses and extract exactly what needs to be done. This is a very hard skill. In B2C the customer is way clearer and the relationship is everything and it’s quite hard a bad professional hide for long.
j45 3y ago
The issue too often is business analysts wanting to be product managers when technical analysts may enable to learn the role better. TA’s will devour the BA’s because tech folks can learn business easier than the other way around. Still, BA’s can learn the details and get more fluent in working with them.
plorkyeran 3y ago
My experience with B2B PMs is that exactly one that I've worked with was amazing and the rest were just an awful intermediary that added a day of latency to any communication with our contact at customers and often managed to mangle things too.