4 ms·

So, fire the Product Managers?

by theK 1y ago

whstl 1y ago
Or at least hold them accountable for failing to get things done and communicating badly with developers. Which is something that I'm yet to see. In previous companies, as an engineering manager, I had to burn a huge amount of political capital to steer my team in the right direction, several times. My people (engineers) want to achieve their goals and create value, and the higher-ups want working software making money. I don't see why this has become so hard to achieve.
- lazide 1y ago
  Because it’s easier to create chaos for some people than it is to actually do what they are supposed to do.
- switch007 1y ago
  How do the evade accountability so often and so deeply? It's bizarre.
  - whstl 1y ago
    By shielding decision-makers/customers and engineers. To give an example of when I had to burn political capital: I had to "skip rank" a few times and go directly to CEOs. They are appreciative when you provide concrete facts, such as "I worked for two weeks on the redesign of this page that zero people use and I'm frankly tired of this bullshit".
    - lazystar 1y ago
      CEO's and VP's and customers appreciate this type of work, but YMMV. Speaking from experience, you'll be surrounded by more enemies in your day-to-day when the side effect of your customer obsession negatively impacts the KPI's that are used to stack rank your direct management chain against other teams and managers. it is quite kafkaesque to be treated as the black sheep after you save $10m a year for the org, then get a pay decrease + meets expectations 8 months later.
      - whstl 1y ago
        Your reply sounds too ironic and too real at the same time. :D But you're 100% right. You have to know when to use the nuclear button. And sometimes you can't press it, which means you take a backseat and watch the company burn money for no reason. This is the point where I start agreeing with _fat_santa's post [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_fat_santa https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_fat_santa
  - lazide 1y ago
    Usually the same way folks like Trump do it. DARVO, leverage, etc. etc.
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  But that can go both ways. As a PM at a previous "engineering-led" company I was on more than one occasions given a prototype that Engineering had been working on for several months (with zero Product awareness, let alone input), and told "here, shoehorn a PRD and PMF around what we already built". In this case, the failure was my PM leadership. I said "I'm not sure about this, I think we need to do more research and figure things out", and got called out for "not being a passionate advocate and evangelist for my products". So I dug in, and with many iterations, and experiments with Engineering we came to something that did have some traction... "You need to strongly hold your opinion!" (Uhhh...) "Four months ago you weren't convinced about this, now you are!" It's all about the political capital, whomever you are. Sadly.
  - whstl 1y ago
    Yep exactly that. It doesn’t matter how much you work or how quantitatively successful you are, there will always be a narcissistic asshole ready to put you down for some made up reason.
esafak 1y ago
I can't tell if you know :) https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-managers-30f73e862ff4 https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
icedchai 1y ago
Good PMs are worth their weight in gold and actually make engineers' jobs easier. Bad PMs create a useless "translation" layer that doesn't help anyone (except, perhaps, themselves.)
- abhisek 1y ago
  How will you define a good PM? I have been looking for this definition for a while. In my startup experience, it seems to me the best PMs are the CTO and the early engineers who has near infinite business and user context.
  - whstl 1y ago
    Same experience, IME founders make amazing PMs, because they care about the company and they care about people not wasting their time. Not OP, but I can answer: They're ok with ideas coming from someone else, check the ego at the door and listen to both engineers and customers. They make engineers work less and produce more value. Most important, they don't have a "vision", they help organize the team so the team has a shared vision built by the team. EDIT: Also: They're not competing with the engineering manager or lead developer for some sort of leadership. They're talking with customers instead of asking sales to do it. They're working on the product aspect of tasks instead of offloading them to engineers.
    - icedchai 1y ago
      yes! The best PMs I've worked with have been founders.
    - jamesfinlayson 1y ago
      > They're not competing with the engineering manager or lead developer for some sort of leadership. Yep. Most of the managers that I've had that have been promoted from engineering have felt that their role is also tech lead, and have been poor at both being a tech lead and a product manager.
      - 1y ago
everdrive 1y ago
I left the government for corporate work, and we didn't have project managers as a specific role. Of course, people were managing projects, but it was nothing like it was in the government. In my short experience, project managers: - Have no understanding of the technology they're "building." - Don't understand who is responsible for what. - Would have NO idea if things were set up incorrectly. - Are solely working through a checklist of items and asking "is this done, or do you have dependencies?" - The checklist itself was just built by interviewing different stakeholders, but it's the PM who puts it together and of course the PM who doesn't really understand the detailed or high level view of the project. It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is. And worse, than the PMs are often leading to worse outcomes. Please keep this in mind anytime someone tells you that we need to "run government like a business," or suggests that businesses are wildly efficient whereas government is never efficient. If we had EVER had a useless PM like this back in government I would have forced them off the project as part of our criteria for success. In the corporate world, there's really no such option, because project success is always secondary to the businesses wants.
- lazystar 1y ago
  product, not project :-)
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    Same pathology, different symptoms. They are professional proxies.
- p_v_doom 1y ago
  > It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is. Tell me about it. I think its because of established common sense and practice that are deeply entrenched on one hand, people that dont really question or think it through on the other and inertia on the third. I work in a project company and the level of useless tools and stuff that gets in the way is crazy. Its like an artifact of the 60s or something.
parliament32 1y ago
I think liability is more important. In my anecdotal experience, PMs are eager to take credit for successes while passing blame for failures. If a PM "owns" a product and calls the shots, it should be crystal clear to leadership that they're accountable for outcomes.

So, fire the Product Managers?

by theK 1y ago

So, fire the Product Managers?

Or at least hold them accountable for failing to get things done and communicating badly with developers. Which is something that I'm yet to see. In previous companies, as an engineering manager, I had to burn a huge amount of political capital to steer my team in the right direction, several times. My people (engineers) want to achieve their goals and create value, and the higher-ups want working software making money. I don't see why this has become so hard to achieve.

lazide 1y ago
Because it’s easier to create chaos for some people than it is to actually do what they are supposed to do.
switch007 1y ago
How do the evade accountability so often and so deeply? It's bizarre.
- whstl 1y ago
  By shielding decision-makers/customers and engineers. To give an example of when I had to burn political capital: I had to "skip rank" a few times and go directly to CEOs. They are appreciative when you provide concrete facts, such as "I worked for two weeks on the redesign of this page that zero people use and I'm frankly tired of this bullshit".
  - lazystar 1y ago
    CEO's and VP's and customers appreciate this type of work, but YMMV. Speaking from experience, you'll be surrounded by more enemies in your day-to-day when the side effect of your customer obsession negatively impacts the KPI's that are used to stack rank your direct management chain against other teams and managers. it is quite kafkaesque to be treated as the black sheep after you save $10m a year for the org, then get a pay decrease + meets expectations 8 months later.
    - whstl 1y ago
      Your reply sounds too ironic and too real at the same time. :D But you're 100% right. You have to know when to use the nuclear button. And sometimes you can't press it, which means you take a backseat and watch the company burn money for no reason. This is the point where I start agreeing with _fat_santa's post [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_fat_santa https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_fat_santa
- lazide 1y ago
  Usually the same way folks like Trump do it. DARVO, leverage, etc. etc.
FireBeyond 1y ago
But that can go both ways. As a PM at a previous "engineering-led" company I was on more than one occasions given a prototype that Engineering had been working on for several months (with zero Product awareness, let alone input), and told "here, shoehorn a PRD and PMF around what we already built". In this case, the failure was my PM leadership. I said "I'm not sure about this, I think we need to do more research and figure things out", and got called out for "not being a passionate advocate and evangelist for my products". So I dug in, and with many iterations, and experiments with Engineering we came to something that did have some traction... "You need to strongly hold your opinion!" (Uhhh...) "Four months ago you weren't convinced about this, now you are!" It's all about the political capital, whomever you are. Sadly.
- whstl 1y ago
  Yep exactly that. It doesn’t matter how much you work or how quantitatively successful you are, there will always be a narcissistic asshole ready to put you down for some made up reason.

esafak 1y ago

I can't tell if you know :) https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-managers-30f73e862ff4 https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

icedchai 1y ago

Good PMs are worth their weight in gold and actually make engineers' jobs easier. Bad PMs create a useless "translation" layer that doesn't help anyone (except, perhaps, themselves.)

abhisek 1y ago
How will you define a good PM? I have been looking for this definition for a while. In my startup experience, it seems to me the best PMs are the CTO and the early engineers who has near infinite business and user context.
- whstl 1y ago
  Same experience, IME founders make amazing PMs, because they care about the company and they care about people not wasting their time. Not OP, but I can answer: They're ok with ideas coming from someone else, check the ego at the door and listen to both engineers and customers. They make engineers work less and produce more value. Most important, they don't have a "vision", they help organize the team so the team has a shared vision built by the team. EDIT: Also: They're not competing with the engineering manager or lead developer for some sort of leadership. They're talking with customers instead of asking sales to do it. They're working on the product aspect of tasks instead of offloading them to engineers.
  - icedchai 1y ago
    yes! The best PMs I've worked with have been founders.
  - jamesfinlayson 1y ago
    > They're not competing with the engineering manager or lead developer for some sort of leadership. Yep. Most of the managers that I've had that have been promoted from engineering have felt that their role is also tech lead, and have been poor at both being a tech lead and a product manager.
    - 1y ago

everdrive 1y ago

I left the government for corporate work, and we didn't have project managers as a specific role. Of course, people were managing projects, but it was nothing like it was in the government. In my short experience, project managers: - Have no understanding of the technology they're "building." - Don't understand who is responsible for what. - Would have NO idea if things were set up incorrectly. - Are solely working through a checklist of items and asking "is this done, or do you have dependencies?" - The checklist itself was just built by interviewing different stakeholders, but it's the PM who puts it together and of course the PM who doesn't really understand the detailed or high level view of the project. It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is. And worse, than the PMs are often leading to worse outcomes. Please keep this in mind anytime someone tells you that we need to "run government like a business," or suggests that businesses are wildly efficient whereas government is never efficient. If we had EVER had a useless PM like this back in government I would have forced them off the project as part of our criteria for success. In the corporate world, there's really no such option, because project success is always secondary to the businesses wants.

lazystar 1y ago
product, not project :-)
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  Same pathology, different symptoms. They are professional proxies.
p_v_doom 1y ago
> It's pretty maddening, and self-evidently stupid. I really cannot fathom why my company and other companies fail to understand what a waste of time and money this is. Tell me about it. I think its because of established common sense and practice that are deeply entrenched on one hand, people that dont really question or think it through on the other and inertia on the third. I work in a project company and the level of useless tools and stuff that gets in the way is crazy. Its like an artifact of the 60s or something.

parliament32 1y ago

I think liability is more important. In my anecdotal experience, PMs are eager to take credit for successes while passing blame for failures. If a PM "owns" a product and calls the shots, it should be crystal clear to leadership that they're accountable for outcomes.