17 ms·

More product, fewer product managers

• burlistic 3y ago
  Some great advice. The best PM I have worked with are visionaries and catalysts. They are great at exploring opportunities areas and bringing the team along.
  • wenc 3y ago
    I've worked with some bad PMs and some great PMs. The great PMs generally follow the advice here: https://staysaasy.com/product/2023/03/12/pm-engineers-dont-hate.html https://staysaasy.com/product/2023/03/12/pm-engineers-dont-h...
• freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute" but the reality is over most orgs Ive been in, they're really just project managers who also have (something) of strategic vision aligned with the marketplace. Don't tell product managers this because they'll get butt hurt and telling you how they aren't.
  • rgrieselhuber 3y ago
    As someone who has hired both, I really don’t see it that way. As another commenter mentioned, the difference is the capability for understanding the problem, being able to envision the right solution, and then manage all the moving pieces to make it a reality. The best ones are similar to startup founders.
    • freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      > see problem > envision right solution > Manage all of the moving parts Congrats you literally just described project management with extra steps.
  • hnarayanan 3y ago
    Thank you
  • airocker 3y ago
    Why not also be the developer if you can do that much already?
    • Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
      Because if you’re working on a project big enough, you don’t have the time to be a good dev or a good manager. As a developer I wanted time to think about how best to solve the problem I was facing, not writing documents, refining the big picture, get a buy in from the stakeholders, giving reports, making sure the other parts of the project kept getting along and so on. It was important for me to be kept in the loop, not doing it on top of my job. As a product manager, it’s the other way: I have a product that need to be there and so I’m trying to find a good compromise between the stakeholders idea, what would really work and what can be done with the ressources I have. That means sometimes I recommend to not start anything, but to buy a solution (then I need to validate that it will work as intended, that the budget and contract are ok and so on) It’s another job altogether. That doesn’t mean I won’t follow the technological trends, educate myself or refuse to program anything. I wrote some postman script to validate what’s happening with our api, know the infra behind it, and can generally point people in the right direction. I have to know the product inside out to make educated answers when something goes wrong or if a decision is required. It’s often a people job. And that’s something I try to share with the teams I work for.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • airocker 3y ago
        We are not talking about a good manager here. We are talking about the one who can program manage to the level of lowest jira issues.
        • naijaboiler 3y ago
          That’s not product management. That’s an under-qualified person misunderstanding their role. Product management is mostly a people job, understanding internal stakeholders, understanding customer, understanding the market, understanding the solution options, formulating and understanding strategy for the product, coordinating product marketing and documentation for the product. If someone can do all that well, there’s simply no time to micro manage jira tickets
  • Moto7451 3y ago
    This matches my experience over 15 years and four companies. This is not a scientific study but I can at least concur with your experience. There are clearly orgs that don’t work this way, but I find that it’s very common when chatting with my PM colleagues. The exceptional cases have been project managers for projects that involve wide scope, multiple products, or some other factor. I’ve also found that in addition to the Project Manager turned Product Manager, there are plenty of Product Managers forced to be Project Managers and it goes poorly unless a Development Manager is willing to carry that. The ultimate problem is that Project Management doesn’t go away just because a company eliminates the role. The same is true for Product Management. If you’re ok with your developers or someone else doing the work, and it is fruitful, great. For about a decade I tried as hard as I could to get one of the limited Product Managers for the products I worked on to very little avail. As a result I had to guess about price increases and other functions that I, someone with 70% of a CS degree and some extension courses in business topics, have to learn on the fly each time I face the challenge. I was successful but I am sure a real Product Manager would have done a better job. The companies I’ve worked for typically have a cynical view of dedicated Project Managers but I appreciate that this is a specific skill for similar reasons to my Development Manager forced to be a Product Manager experience.
    • pnathan 3y ago
      I have very rarely encountered a PM(any title) who lucidly communicated their value-add to the company. It is certain that, e.g., someone needs to assess the pricing of a product and how to position it in the market. But it's unclear that the vast majority of people I've worked with are performing that task - they are, to all appearances managing projects and doing secretarial coordination work (ticket munging), something experienced devs and managers can do straightforwardly up to a certain point. I think its one of those roles that you don't need until product (project) scope is a certain point, but it's been glommed onto smaller companies as they mimic the big-corp designs. So it never quite works for those small shops. They really just need a Product Person, singular, who drives the thing forward, IMO.
  • anon23432343 3y ago
    I had project were we hade not difference between po, pm and scrum master. No difference at all on what they did.
    • ath3nd 3y ago
      All those jobs do look the same because they are all bullshit jobs which infantile developers assuming they can't do and decide anything for themselves but write code on command.
  • aurareturn 3y ago
    Project managers don't strategize or lead a vision of what the product should look like. It sounds like your strength is more in project management than product management so perhaps that's why the organizations tend to place you in that role?
    • freitzkriesler2 3y ago
      If it wasn't clear, i'm a product manager that started in project management. The real problem is product management is hot, project management is old. I've been around the block enough times at different companies to form that opinion and thats OK. Product management is consistently project management with extra steps. Those steps being business and market analysis to solve customer problems. It seems businesses are starting to realize that.
      • aurareturn 3y ago
        What you're saying isn't new. It's part of the Product Manager job description. They have to organize their teams to achieve their vision. Even CEOs do project management if the company is small enough. Every founder does project management too. So do engineering managers and individual engineers.
  • koliber 3y ago
    You shared an interesting perspective, but ruined the delivery with the last line.
  • Hippocrates 3y ago
    I think the problem with these two roles is actually the confusion about what each is. Usually the issue is a "product" manager not doing the ideating, not doing research, not enough advocating about what user needs or what the product should be. Instead they do too much "project" management which amounts to gantt charts, check-ins, and nagging about status. I have seen that in all sizes and maturities of company that people view these roles as interchangeable and they are not.
• bbarn 3y ago
  As a developer, and a development manager, the best product managers I've worked with rarely got involved in the "how". Sure, they may generate epic-level tickets in your back log, but lower than that, they trust you and the project people to get things done. Problem is, the org needs to support that, and in most companies, the work that gets the most attention isn't visionary or growth focused, it's whatever is making the loudest noise. Often that is in direct conflict with a product owner/manager's desires.
  • antupis 3y ago
    Or they are super into weeds polishing stuff in code level but it is never between those two approaches. Also very good pm can be kinda shackled if there is lots of mediocre pms running around.
  • anon23432343 3y ago
    On the other side I have worked with PM/POs who have no clue and the developers are just telling them: "Oh this is super complicated you would not understand" or "This will take a long time to implement" and its a small feature. There must be a balance. There must be some basic understanding by the PM/POs. They cant be the person that barley can use a computer.
    • Wurdan 3y ago
      It also helps to be able to understand the tech enough to know if a certain approach is going to impact other initiatives which are further down the roadmap. One of my favourite questions I've been asked by a PM is "Will any of this work become easier to do if we change the order of these work items?"
      • radiator 3y ago
        I would have thought every manager asks such questions either to himself or to the team quite often.
        • 3y ago
• ChilledTonic 3y ago
  Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream. I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just space filler. Especially when you can't even curate the image generated well enough to have every person in the image have the correct number of fingers.
  • mr90210 3y ago
    That’s a fair take.
  • jackblemming 3y ago
    Agreed, the issue isn't AI, it’s poor taste. Nobody wants to see what looks like an uncanny valley picture of all large ethnic groups smiling weirdly in a circle at each other. This bizarre soulless corpo art trend started well before AI generation rocketed in popularity.
  • signaru 3y ago
    It's not just AI art. Memes and unrelated stock image have also been used. It might be due to some SEO belief.
    • 0x1ceb00da 3y ago
      God I hate memes on medium pages.
      • davidthewatson 3y ago
        Me too, especially when the underlying root cause is siloed communication arising from founder burnout or sheer disinterest not the supply of product management thinking. It's as if you needed the subtractive design thinking of the two Bobs in office space and what you got instead was aimless growth of product like cancer.
• drewcoo 3y ago
  > the ideal time to hire a PM at a startup is when the founders can no longer be involved in all the important product decisions No, that's when the founders need to hire actual managers. Their staff is already used to involvement in product decisions, right? Then there are a bunch of traits and activities of PMs listed. I would think that the time to hire a PM is when the founders can't do that list of things, if that's what PMs do. > it's easy to overestimate how many an organization needs Why? The article avoids addressing that, telling us when to hire and how to right-size, but doesn't bother defining the problem being solved. My experience is that the more devs there are per PM, the more the PMs start thinking they're "in charge of" the devs and then no one's happy. I'd like to see more of a "PMs as customer research consultants" model instead - contribute something that the devs don't have time to do.
  • janpio 3y ago
    > but doesn't bother defining the problem being solved. An experienced product person could maybe have helped with that *scnr
• buro9 3y ago
  I think in ratios. How many frontend engineers to backend? How many engineering managers to ICs? How many technical writers to (all) engineers? How many product managers to (all) engineers? And I try and keep the ratios finely tuned to have the greatest impact but the least meddling, the least micromanagement. What the numbers for these ratios are is likely specific to your organisation, but if you detect meddling or too much of the "how" not coming from the engineers themselves, change the ratios, increase engineers per people or product manager, make it so that they cannot do this and instead have to prioritise what they get involved in, to step back from the micro, and to cede autonomy on how back to the engineers.
  • phendrenad2 3y ago
    This is the only sand way to go. It's surprising how many places just don't have PMs, or have far too many PMs (also applies to QA, junior engineers, senior engineers, architects, HR personnel, Vice Presidents, salespeople, etc.)
• PaulRobinson 3y ago
  When I was a software engineer, I used to think I was the smartest person in the room, and derided the work of product managers, delivery managers and to some extent engineering managers. I've had experience of engineering roles up to Principal and Hands-on CTO and felt that we didn't need the non-engineering backgrounds at all. Today, I find myself in a senior TPM role for a FAANG who also has "product manager" in his customer-facing job role. I cringe at my behaviour 15 years ago. I shake my head as a I hear software engineers using the same arguments I did. "We know how to do product management, you're just slowing us down". In recent years, on a few internal projects I step back and watch projects with no product or project management resource - just engineers - and the same pattern emerges over and over again: no clear customer-facing objectives, not enough time spent listening to customers, not enough work in the ramp up to design, not enough work in figuring out the long-term operational factors of owning a product, poor customer communication (no, they'd don't understand your technical documents, sorry, and they've told you that, and you don't know what to do about it, but huh, isn't this tricky?), and more often than not, misaligned internal objectives and politics meaning the product has "camps", driven by individual preferences and career/promotion objectives. It's a mess. Every time. You might not need product managers, but you need product management, and most engineers are atrocious at it. They want to focus on the technical work and are not prepared to commit to the work that comes with product management. It's often wise to just hire product managers. You might not need project managers, but you need project management, and engineers are often poor at it. You probably should have project managers. Product managers often have better organisational skills - and the attuned level of empathy needed to listen to all stakeholders which is needed in project management - to be able to do project management too. If you're still not convinced look at OSS. Most of it is only accessibly to other engineers, until one of two things happen: a project starts to ape product design decisions made by commercial projects, which has happened with a lot of office and graphics programs; or, somebody with real product management expertise gets involved and is able to influence the project. I know many people will disagree. They'll insist they know better. I expect downvotes because some people will feel affronted. I know this, because 15 years ago I felt the same. I was wrong. You're wrong if you feel that way too, and you'll realise it over time, particularly if you're asked to do it for a while. Product management is a real skill. And yes, most teams could do it better. And project management skills - particularly agile skills - are awful in the industry. But please, stop thinking the answer is more engineers.
• cateye 3y ago
  This article and many people attempting to analyze this topic (and many others) are missing a key element: "incentives"! Many developers are more passionate about technology itself – coding, solving complex technical problems, and creating efficient solutions. Their formal rewards (like promotions, bonuses, and recognition) are often tied to technical achievements. If a developer spends 40 hours on customer research, this effort might not be as formally recognized or rewarded as much as a technical achievement like developing a new authentication solution that benefits the entire team. Shifting this dynamic is not just about encouraging developers to spend more time on product management. It requires a systemic change in how organizations value and reward. Changing the incentive structure to be more user-centric and less technically focused would significantly impact middle and upper management roles. A shift would challenge the very foundations of their roles and responsibilities, potentially leading to a loss of control and influence. It's likely that such changes would face subtle yet strong resistance from middle and upper management. These individuals often have significant political power within an organization and a vested interest.
  • SigKill9 3y ago
    Thanks for the comment. And I completely agree. Incentives shapes so much of how people work. I tried to capture that in the 3rd bullet, but your comment is more on-point :)
  • atoav 3y ago
    This isn't that hard. Just have your developers train people with your software. In every craft you learn the moment the rubber hits the road. A film director can watch the film in the editing room a thousand times, but the one first time watching it with a real audience will teach them more than those 1000 hours together. A carpenter can work away on a piece of furniture merrily all week long and be happy with themselves, but the moment of truth comes when the furniture is placed into the customers room. The same is true for software. If you want your software engineers to care about users they have to get first hand feedback what works and what sucks, preferably with their own eyes. Every software engineer worth their salt has a certain degree of pride about doing things well. If this only ever is about the code, the commit history or other abstract concepts, but never about how well it can be used by the actual people it was made for, then how would they even start caring?
• a3d 3y ago
  Good devs with good communication == Better then PM Dev + Business = speed and customer centric Dev + PM + Business = one more layer, i.e. slow, i.e. some loss of customer voice I worked at Amazon as dev for 10 yrs. In early days 2001+. Amazon did not hire PMs then. Best of Amazon exp came out in that period. I was part of that myself. Pm is needed for things like building amazon prime. If at all.
  • ath3nd 3y ago
    That's a very based take! The whole idea of a PM boils down to address a less qualified non technical middle man to make all the important decisions, while also pigeon hole your communications with the rest of the stakeholders. Why does this role even exist is beyond me. It's like we can't trust the engineers with any important decisions, so we need some business guy who took a two week course and now is suddenly qualified to be calling all the shots.
    • esafak 3y ago
      It is easier to build an engineering team when you don't expect them to be product-minded in addition to being technically proficient.
• sunpazed 3y ago
  I’ve been in product management for over 20 years, and I agree with most of what is said here. Ratios matter. CPOs end up empire building with an army of PMs. The organisation ends up with PMs owning a slice of the customer experience such as a single page, optimising CTRs on buttons, with no meaningful contribution to the product strategy or vision. It’s hard to be a Product Manager without owning a product.
  • heisenbit 3y ago
    Indeed. PMs are paired on a scrum master level. Then scrum master - due to the fact that they are "SCRUM MASTERS" and not developers focus also on PM type work. To make matters worse the "easily interchangeable" developers are coming from an outsourcing company. Now the development needs to be isolated from the customers with more management. It is a great way to increase the GDP.
  • ftio 3y ago
    Longtime PM as well, and I strongly agree. PMs should have lots of surface area —- ideally, an entire product (or more). PMs should also be a lot more focused on the business’ goals than most PMs are. It’s necessary but insufficient to solve problems for your users. Solving those problems needs to translate into value for your company too. Strong, product-minded Eng/UX partners are essential in enabling that.
    • jasondigitized 3y ago
      This. The closer to the P&L the better. It forces you to act as a "whole product" manager and not think everything is solved by adding a new feature.
  • NearAP 3y ago
    > It’s hard to be a Product Manager without owning a product I'll say it depends on the size of the product. If you're dealing with say ERPs (Oracle Fusion Apps, WorkDay, SAP, etc), a PM can't own an entire product. Instead, they'll own multiple features where each of those features are complex in themselves and being ERP typically involve integration with multiple other products. But I agree with the general thrust of your point which seems to be that the PM should own something 'significant'
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  > With any experienced team of engineers and designers, PM'ing is not a full-time job, or at least, it shouldn't be. after the free money era peaked, consultants have now pivoted to efficient downsizing. when my previous corp merged with another, the first people fired where PM's. so its nothing new. imo PM is the epitome of the bs jobs phenomenon.
• koliber 3y ago
  > Frankly, PMs are not the ones to handle UX, wireframing, tracking progress, organizing stand-ups, or being the sole authors of PRDs/specs, etc. Who should be? There are many schools of thought on this. In the end, it comes down to clearly defining who needs to be responsible for all the different things that go into defining, designing, and building a product. Given the approach to product management in this article, what would the rest of the team look like?
• bjornsing 3y ago
  I've spent some time interacting with product managers as an engineering manager, or head of a functional area. I've also been "acting" PM for an internal product at a medium size tech company. I think product management entails some of the most important things a company does. But it's really hard work, and many less capable PMs gravitate away from it and more towards either "driving" (i.e. micromanaging) the engineering team or just playing politics. In an organization with separate Engineering and Product functions / org charts this is really hard to deal with. You can complain up the chain of command, but bandwidth in that direction is (for natural reasons) very limited. As an EM the end result is often that these PMs make life miserable for your best engineers, and they leave. My current view is that the best approach is to embed product management in the form of a "mini-CEO" (i.e. PM) in each team, and if they're not technically competent pairing them with a "mini-CTO". Much less room for politics, and much more for teamwork.
  • demondemidi 3y ago
    “Politics” 35 years in the semi industry. I must be stupid. I really don’t see politics. I see people trying to argue for their option and get support. But I’ve never seen this politics that people complain about. I’m so lucky I guess. Is politics just someone making a better argument that is the wrong technical decision? What is “politics”? Or am I just not at a high enough level (senior principal)?
    • epgui 3y ago
      Politics is what happens when you have limited resources and you need to decide where to allocate them. Politics are everywhere humans are.
      • legendofbrando 3y ago
        Yes to this. Too many people complain about politics as if it is some “outside” force and not simply implicit in the way that human beings organize diversified interests. Since each of us can only embody our own world view, politics is inevitable. I understand that what people typically mean is people who are “too political” where the pushing for interests stops being in service of some goal and starts to become its own point. But in trying to avoid the appearance of that, too many people fail to engage in any politics and in doing so actually cause more harm than good to what is important to them by missing the important point that it’s incumbent to speak up for things you need and believe in because people who allocate resources may have insufficient knowledge or insufficient time to dedicate to knowing your work that intimately.
• allsunny 3y ago
  I wonder what the author might suggest as an appropriate ratio of PMs to engineers might be. I generally like 1 per 10 person team. I also like the idea of not having a separate product tool but have yet to see a good tool that can satisfy software project management (eg Jira, Linear) and product ops (product board, Airtable).
  • Huppie 3y ago
    I've never seen the tool before but my guess (based on the frontpage) is that kitemaker is their attempt at building such a tool.
  • icedchai 3y ago
    I work at a place with approximately 3 PMs for 6 developers and I wonder what they do all day. Totally absurd.
• davidthewatson 3y ago
  What founders, managers, and engineers share is the team responsibility for founding, managing, and engineering the product and its value proposition. A product's value proposition may be mostly subjective but is easily made objective by cost/revenue ratio.
• GiorgioG 3y ago
  Most non-technical PMs I’ve worked with have been ineffective because they don’t understand or think in terms of systems, they only think in “screens” and “buttons”. Put me in the “get rid of product managers altogether” camp.
  • DanielHB 3y ago
    Being able to show a relational database schema to a manager and ask: "is this the data we need in the manner we need" is invaluable
• Hippocrates 3y ago
  The problem with most PMs is that they are not doing boots-on-the-ground work. A good PM should be constantly bridging the gap between engineering and the user. 1. Map the product or idea being built to those who will use it. Present it, get users feelings on it, if it is viable and needed. Throughout development, gather continuous feedback by demoing, shadowing, and adapting to new feedback. Plan and execute a launch, watch for snags, provide support and solutions to users. 2. Communicate gathered feedback to engineering, and do so with an understanding of where the project is engineering-wise, where it is going, what needs to change. Give engineering the "why. Convey the priority of everything the project needs vs what it has and what is being worked on. Repeat this feedback loop. But most of them seem to think they can operate entirely in document-land and just crank out roadmap docs and keep stakeholder alignment via endless check-ins and nagging. They are doing a "project manager" job instead.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • jack_riminton 3y ago
    Having been a PM (now developer) the problem I faced was half the time I was having to provide documentation, communications and evidence for my managers. Which is of course fine but when you have HIPPO syndrome (HIghest Paid Person in the Office) who likes to make product decisions then you have to spend most of your time covering your back and managing up PMs get a lot of stick, sometimes justified, but they're just having to play office politics in order to get stuff done
    • bhpm 3y ago
      Yep. And then you leave and the engineers start complaining they have to play office politics to get things done. :)
    • hilux 3y ago
      PM->Dev is not the typical trajectory, although it's one I'm considering. How do you feel about the transition?
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• basedbros 3y ago
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• nf3 3y ago
  I guess I belong to the tiny minority of self-employed software developers, so my point of view is somewhat unique. In all of the projects where I had to deal with people representing big companies, I was always struck by the sheer amount of wasted time spent on meetings, political machinations, and bike shedding, instead of doing actual work that solves the client's problems. I'm really glad to be my own boss and to not have a PM over my head.
• CASHforGOLD 3y ago
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• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  A bad product manager is worse than no product manager. And it is hard to become a product manager that does not do a bad job. Feature creep, not understanding software development methodologies, not having an intuition around technology, not talking to users, not talking to the team = bad product management. Maximizing the value of what the team is working on = good product management.
• robotsquidward 3y ago
  Well articulated thoughts that are mostly detached from the eye-grabbing headline. Good PM's are important. Building product-focused teams is important. More of anything != more better. Duh.
• edderly 3y ago
  The best product manager I worked with was just an exceptionally bright person, they were able to understand complexity of implementation (and even have a reasonable chance of doing it themselves) vs understanding the business need. Just basically a value add to the company without being an engineering manager. Unfortunately most product managers are just people who sit in the role. They are just gatekeepers who take either credit or blame. They often have little skin in the game. Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong.
  • strix_varius 3y ago
    > Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong. Agreed, the best (and most successful) products I've worked on have all had product ownership by actual implementers (engineers, designers, customer success, etc). I loved being on the support rotation as an engineer because it closed the gap of abstraction between my work and the real humans who were using it every second. Very rarely, I have worked with PMs who add net positive value, and in every case they would have made okay engineers as well.
  • phillipcarter 3y ago
    > Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong. I've found myself on both sides of this issue in my career and I've landed on it being a good thing to have a PM organization, assuming your entire org is large enough. The main reason why is that when PM (or whoever plays that role in a team) reports up to the same engineering management chain, all things eventually bias towards the needs of engineering. Much-needed feature work that is likely to advance the business eventually always gets de-prioritized because there's always tech debt or infrastructure work that inhibits people in some way. Sometimes it's actually the right move to do that, but you need tension between two orgs that have equal chairs at the table to make that kind of call. That ends up not happening when it's a part of engineering. Of course a lot of the sad reality in our industry is that separate PM orgs get to have more power than engineering orgs because they get to own "what's good for the business", and when you combine that with a bunch of PMs who know how to follow a process or framework but don't actually understand their own products or users, you get a nightmare.
• earayu 3y ago
  I am a software engineer, most of the time, PMs are just make my work harder.
• ralmidani 3y ago
  Not related to number of PMs, but rather the type that I prefer to work with: I’ve worked at 4 different companies in the industry, ranging from < 40 person startups all the way up to JP Morgan Chase. I reject the idea that “technical” folks are smarter than “non-technical” folks - in fact, as an engineer I often get caught in the weeds and lose sight of the big picture, and need a PM to help pull me out. However, in my experience, the easiest PMs to work with as an engineer are ones who have at least __some__ actual exposure to code. Nothing fancy, it could have been building a website with HTML and CSS many years ago, writing some ad hoc SQL queries, or taking a Python class while doing a Master’s degree. __something__ that helps a PM understand that writing code is neither an exact science nor outright wizardry. These PMs tend to advocate for the engineers they work with, or at least try to strike a balance between business demands and engineering realities. Those who get into PM with zero technical exposure tend to be more “business-oriented”, which may be exactly what a business needs at a given time, but not all the time, and as an engineer I would rather work with someone who has a better understanding of my perspective as well.
  • ericmay 3y ago
    Now if only companies (like JPM where I’ve worked also) actually recruited and hired PMs with those technical skills instead of whatever bizarre criteria they use. No I’m not salty at all :p
• flipgimble 3y ago
  I’ve worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies and seen many examples of a disfuncional culture. I’ve seen in those places that PMs solve most problems with the one tool at their disposal: meetings. Incentives for promotions are such that the bigger your meeting the more important you are. I’ve been in hi dress of hours of cross functions team meeting where 1-2 people did any work, and usually the PM talked the whole time, while 10-20ppl are on mute and only sign off at the end to show they indeed exist. The end result see teams of dejected engineers that don’t have time for actual technical work, and are asked to give estimates or commitments on the spot without any research or even understanding of the code. I’ve seen PMs reject technical designs because they didn’t like the number or “points”, and engineers just had to reformat the same ideas into different “tickets” to satisfy some inscrutable PM aesthetics. Entire projects delayed and derailed because of lack of understanding and pointless status signaling rituals. On the other hand I’ve worked with brilliant PM who protected the team from such nonsense and helped them stay focused on the right goal. These people are invaluable as much as the others are detrimental.
• steveBK123 3y ago
  "Expose everyone to users " - I would note this of course has logical limits. I've worked in orgs where we had shared slack channels (and DM ability) with all customers. Not great. This meant that squeaky wheels got a lot of oil. They quickly figured out who in the channel actually knew what they were doing, and so every customer had their pet senior engineer they would bother all hours of the day / weekends / etc with questions. Support rotas and on-calls go out the door when your customers can directly escalate to their engineer of choice. I actually turned off all slack alerts and disabled notifications on my phone as a mental health exercise as a result. So the net result of forcing me to be maximally reachable caused me to be less reachable as a whole. If someone important enough really needed me, they had text/phone/etc.
  • mixmastamyk 3y ago
    > I actually turned off all slack alerts and disabled notifications on my phone Nobody should be reachable after 5pm unless they work the night shift and/or being paid to be oncall. That you “actually” disabled these alerts points to a culture problem at work. A work app should not even be installed on your mobile. Put your workstation to sleep at the end of the work day and don’t wake it until the next one. As you said, they can call for the once in a year emergency.
• cloudking 3y ago
  In my experience in multiple roles (product manager, project manager, software engineer) and dozens of successful launches with large engineering teams, the ideal kind of PM has a deep understanding of users, how software should work best for them AND technical experience. The problem with a purely technical team and no user-centric PM guidance is they'll end up building an engineering designed product, that doesn't resonate with non-technical users. As pure engineers, we love engineering, and may over-engineer solutions given the opportunity. Unless we are building some developer tools or highly technical product, this doesn't work for the majority of non-technical products. You need a PM who can separate the technical design from the user experience, but also understands how to bridge the two when it comes to actually building the product. No technical experience rarely helps, as you spend a lot of wasted time debating why things should or can't be built. As a PM with technical background, I'm not going to waste engineering time proposing radical user experiences that I know will require excess resources and time to build. At the same time, deeply understanding what users want, I'm not going to build a product that is too technical for them to understand how to use. We understand the limits of our technical stack and how to reduce user frustration. That is the advantage of having a balanced PM with both user and technical experience.
• hilux 3y ago
  I've been a PM in a few B2B companies, and the reality of the job was never even close to the ad, i.e. we (PMs) never had authority over either Engineering or Marketing. "Product-led" is today's buzzword, but I'd have to personally experience it before I believe it.
  • phillipcarter 3y ago
    Yeah, IMO "product-led" is just something that sounds nice when you package it up with a bunch of truisms and sell it as a consultant. There's a nice little industrial complex of consultants, "coaches", and other thought leaders who haven't shipped any product in a decade or more but will gladly sell you their silly services. We're just here to do a job like anyone else, with hopefully a reasonable area of accountability. The thing that "drives" a particular initiative is what matters the most at the time - could be a big marketing push, engineering quality push, something we know sells well into enterprise markets, etc. It's fine.
• teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Definitely agree that the ones building should be product-minded. It should be normal and expected for engineers to perform customer interviews.
• thenerdhead 3y ago
  You can summarize this article with a famous Einstein quote: > Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Isn't it clear that scale governs the self-determination theory? You can run a company much like a startup if you choose to. Many people/businesses do not choose to do that and that allows bureaucracy and hierarchy to thrive. This isn't a "product manager" problem. This is a loss of identity or culture. Many of your great people will leave because of this eroding. Blaming it on product managers is lazy because it shows you aren't looking close enough. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_organization
• hkon 3y ago
  Working in the industry around 20 years now. It has become painfully obvious that businesses are out of ideas. Speaking in simple terms. Product managers never really stick around long enough to learn enough about a market or a product to bring any valuable insights or new ideas to the table. Spend 1 year to push the "MVP" then it's off to the next one with a salary increase. Used to be a product guy that was 20 years + with a firm would have lots of ideas and hammering the development teams to ship feature after feature. I just don't see that anymore in the places I lend a hand.
• stockholm 3y ago
  Designers should understand design, engineers should understand function - and PMs should understand the market. For instance why should we prioritise one segment over the other? How should we price the product? What are the second order effects of prioritising one feature over the other?
• CSMastermind 3y ago
  Most product management functions should be merged into product design - it's impossible to design a good product without thinking about what features that product should have and how users will use it. I wouldn't eliminate the role entirely but I think most companies have 10x the number of product managers they need to in part because it's a way for non-technical people to get into tech and tech salaries. Now that the market is tightening it's unsurprisingly we're eliminating those roles.
• 015a 3y ago
  One thing I've been thinking more-and-more about recently: People are unique; there's no doubt about that. But how much of "the product manager does product management" is genuinely just the title they're assigned, versus some innate capability they were born with? I'm becoming more agreeable to the notion that, at least in product development: most people should be doing more things. People can and should have specialization; but maybe it should be more organic and nuanced, like "Mike is our API guy, but he's also pretty good at organizing large projects and if you've got a big architectural ick to work through definitely go talk to him" versus "Sarah is more on the product side, she'll have great insight into user experience and she knows who to talk to in the organization to get decisions made faster, but she can also take on some smaller frontend tickets." My argument isn't really "great idea dude, let's get rid of titles"; because I think the critical part is, this mindset is deeply predicated on Agency. You need an organization that assigns High Definition and High Agency to teams. You also need a hiring process that, very specifically, treats Personal Agency as one of the most important qualities a candidate can have; you don't know Go, that's cool, we can teach you Go, what we can't teach you is the genuine desire to want to be taught Go, and Rust, and some language I haven't even heard of, and by the way you're interested in the overall business and revenue and such. The obvious problem is, people like that are a vast minority, and maybe you can't really scale companies by relying on the people you hire being intelligent generalists. I think there's also something to be said in the force multiplication of technology. A room with five of the right people can be more effective and productive than a skyscraper of 500.
  • pitched 3y ago
    People with a lot of personal agency in this way will also slow things down by expecting rational decisions from management and asking questions when they aren’t. I think this makes for a fantastic partner, peer or co-worker but a horrible employee. So I don’t think it’s too surprising that most hiring managers will be actively filtering them out. As someone who does very highly value this way of thinking though, how would you try to detect it in an interview setting as an interviewee? That’s like asking them if they have good culture.
    • charlie0 3y ago
• kbos87 3y ago
  The reason I can't stand debates like this is that the "most right" answer is highly dependent on the details of the organization. Strong opinions are borne from bad experiences and people tend to generalize the patterns they've observed first hand. A small org with a founder who has a strong vision they are good at articulating probably doesn't need many PMs. Similarly, you might find teams with engineers who are actually very user and market minded and have the bandwidth to do some of that work. Or, in the case of Airbnb, you can essentially split up the role and assign pieces of it to separate teams (which, the more I hear about it, strikes me as odd.) At the end of the day, patterns in roles - and the PM role in general - usually exist for a good reason. There's a critical set of skills that, when done well, are very much justified and should exist as a single role - not the side project of a developer or a designer.
  • sullivantrevor 3y ago
    Yeah he said that in the article
• physicsguy 3y ago
  I've recently left a job because of bad product management. The big issue I find is that often PMs are too far away from the product and spending all their time politicking and thinking about "strategy", so they have no idea how much work a particular feature is. I was leading a technical team in my last job working on industrial software, and I'd regularly have a PM come to me and tell me that there's been a contract signed for a new customer, and we have X piece of bespoke work as part of that contract due by usually ~1 month in the future. So you start asking questions, what does X mean, how do you want to resolve this problem, etc. etc. etc. and most of the time, the PM can't answer those questions, so you're stuck. And the deadline gets closer and closer, and then the customer isn't happy when it inevitably gets missed, and the pressure comes down on you as an engineer to make things work, and people get burnt out. My view is that PMs should sit super super close to the team. There should never be a case where the software team is more knowledgeable about the product function than the PM, but in practice this is often the case.
• jasontheknight 3y ago
  The general pattern of replies from developers to any thread like this tends to go "I worked at a company and the PM was bad so therefore all PMs are bad and pointless". And, let's be clear, there are lots of undertrained, underskilled PMs out there working on the wrong things (delivery management, writing tickets, bossing devs around etc). BUT - this is a leadership problem. Either leadership want and expects PMs to be doing those things (dysfunctional product mindset) or they want them to be better PMs but don't know how (poor performance management). In either case, firing all the PMs and expecting the devs to do it just means the devs get thrown into the fire instead. They're welcome to try! But, the idea that removing PMs from a dysfunctional organisation fixes anything is nonsensical. The devs will be just as unhappy taking orders from a more senior stakeholder who understands them even less. Good product managers can be game changers. They absolutely should not spend all their time bossing developers around. They don't need to be former developers themselves (although there's nothing wrong with developers becoming PMs). They don't need to spend all their time on tech. Building great products isn't as simple as saying "The developers can do it" and letting them build whatever. How many developers really want to work on market strategy, pricing and packaging, customer segmentation, user interviews, wrangling stakeholders etc? I guess... maybe some... but enough? The whole fetish that developers have for "just let us do it" will dissolve quickly in a good or bad organisation because they only see the bits they want to see. For the record, I spent 20 years as a developer before moving into product leadership.