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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 produ
by 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 agoPolitics is what happens when you have limited resources and you need to decide where to allocate them. Politics are everywhere humans are.
- legendofbrando 3y agoYes 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.
- epgui 3y agoPolitics would be less of a shit show if people had intro textbook level knowledge about political science and/or didn’t approach it like a sport.
- bjornsing 3y ago> 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. It typically doesn’t stop being in service of some goal, but rather becomes entirely self-serving.
- bjornsing 3y agoThat’s the good side of politics, and I agree: it is everywhere humans are trying to accomplish things together. But when I say gravitate away from hard work towards playing politics it refers to something else of course. Getting others to do your work while still claiming credit is one example.
- epgui 3y agoIt’s not the good side of politics, it’s how it’s defined in textbooks.
- bjornsing 3y agoI don’t think those textbooks attempt to define the concept in this context. Like it or not, “corporate politics” is a well established term.
- epgui 3y agoConsider whether the stuff you’re thinking about is “politics” or merely “stupidity” or “malice” (or some combination of these). I see no need to mix up the words.
- jack_riminton 3y agoThis is the grown-up answer that this thread is clearly lacking
- demondemidi 3y agoBut why then is it used as a pejorative? What you described is "engineering".
- epgui 3y agoThat's not at all what engineering is. Engineering is the application of science (including mathematics) to solve technical problems and/or optimize processes. An engineer also has to eat lunch in order to function, but engineering is not the same thing as professional food critiquing. --- To answer your question, it's pejorative because politics is about allocating resources one way or another, towards and away from particular social groups. It's inherently going to be making some of the people unhappy, 100% of the time. Real life politics also tends to not be done smartly and honestly at all times and in all places, and this can make some people upset as well. Most people associate all of that together, and most people don't take an academic (or particularly analytical) approach to the subject.
- gardenhedge 3y agoIt's possible you've never worked with politically minded people but I doubt it. It can be as small as an engineer broadcasting how hard a problem is before solving it. If they do that, they get the kudos for doing it. If they don't, it just gets done unnoticed.
- legendofbrando 3y agoMost people who dislike political people are failing to place the blame on the right actor. Sounds like this engineer has recognized how to get rewarded at their job and has adjusted their behavior to fit. The actual root problem is that this reward system fails to recognize the quiet everyday progress required to make something great.
- tomrod 3y agoIn other words, in areas of limited resources where politics are innate, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
- rjzzleep 3y agoPolitics is a when a company like Caterpillar spends a year trying to acquire GPU's for their autonomous vehicle teams, because they have 20 security and project managers that want to assert themselves in every conversation to get promoted, to get to senior leadership positions, while the company looses out to Chinese competitors they were ahead of. Politics is also when middle managers and 2 engineers conspire to steal a coworkers work to get promoted and move up the silicon valley startup ladder, so that the company has to come back a year later to bring back the original engineer, because none of these people were capable. If you haven't seen politics you might have been either blessed or didn't want to see it, but for every 1 company I worked with that was efficient I worked with 4 that were not.
- subwrmodblocker 3y agoThe semiconductor industry actually does something. In web development it’s 100% political. Around 2018 it became easy enough to do web development at FAANG companies that there’s really no such thing as merit because even the worst employee is as valuable as the best.
- bjornsing 3y agoYou’ve worked for 35 years and you’ve never seen anyone act out of self-interest to the detriment of the project / company? Either you’re incredibly lucky or you’re blind. ;)
- demondemidi 3y agoI'll take Blind for $1000 Alex. The self-interested people I saw were weeded out unless they made decisions that led to stock increase. In which case their self-interest was aligned with the correct decision. I don't call either one politics. I think of politics as useless bickering that doesn't advance the project. Usually it is self-correcting for the reason above. I've seen a lot of bad decisions drive company's stock into the shitter, but I think of that as simply the "wrong" decision. Shit, I think I -AM- blind. Hmm....
- marcinzm 3y agoPolitics in this type of context is fighting to the death over a single pie versus working together to bake a second pie. Some of this is necessary but when you only do this a company will not grow except through luck.
- at_a_remove 3y agoI'll give you one from personal experience, and it was in an academic setting. My boss, whom I will call Boss W (who spent a lot of time maneuvering people around) had first worked for my previous boss, Boss F. Boss W, I think, spent more time playing chess than anything else. First he worked out a situation where he was peer to Boss F, then, with another coup, managed to get Boss F working for him.. Still not satisfied, he managed to change to whom the department reported to from Uberboss J to Uberboss C. Uberboss C, who was peer to another administrative type, Administrator W, was eager to prove the value to the change. And so I was tasked with developing a product rather similar to something that Administrator W had at his previous job. The product itself was politics, in that it presented to a group of stakeholders about a thousand to three thousand items to decide the disposition of. But this was futile, really, because we had about six hundred thousand items to have reviewed, so we would never actually get anywhere with presenting this to the stakeholders. But they wanted it and so ... And so I was told that this was going to be an Agile thing, and I had until the start of the semester to have it done, and they needed to see a fully-featured prototype (a contradiction) right away. Although promised, I never got to meet with the internal stakeholders who would present this product to the external stakeholders who would do the disposition. That's quite a tight deadline, but it gets interrupted because to prove value to someone else, I get sent on a week-long conference doing something utterly unrelated. They just wanted to prove to the guy running Dept B that they were going to have someone in the mix for his technology. Despite this and catching a tremendous cold, I managed to have something developed by the start of the semester, because it was so very very urgent. And then it was not shown to the internal stakeholders for seven months. All o that hustle! So Agile much wow.
- ath3nd 3y agoI don't believe in Product Managers or Project Owners as a net good towards building a better product or a better company. The most successful teams I have been in had no dedicated product role, instead, all decisions were made by the developers. My current view is best to remove all type of non technical people or even mildly technical people from the developers' way and let them build in peace.
- alistairSH 3y agoIn that scenario, who is driving product requirements? For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory compliance laws, are you expecting every engineer to be an expert in those laws? And have contacts at the government agencies implementing those policies?
- lol768 3y agoEngineers should ideally be working directly with in-house counsel or external specialists under these circumstances. This isn't just applicable to some niche organisations working within e.g. finance (though there's likely to be a higher regulatory burden there), engineers need a basic understanding of something like GDPR to do their job because it impacts every organisation handling personal information in any form.
- laurels-marts 3y agoIn extremely regulated environments you would typically have someone with legal background to boil down the requirements into their absolute essence and give them to the dev team.
- alistairSH 3y agoSo you DO have a product manager. You might not call them that, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.
- ath3nd 3y agoThat's not a product manager. That's a domain expert. You might have to check some regulatory checkboxes: - financial - medical - data protection and you might need different experts' opinion for that. Do you suggest that they are all product managers?
- gardenhedge 3y agoA mini cto is an architect in this position