6 ms·
"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who
by shubhamjain 1y ago
"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers"
"GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product"
Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anikom15 1y agoThe Mythical Man-Month was written in 1975, and it seems hardly anyone has still bothered to read it.
- disgruntledphd2 1y agoYeah, when I read it (probably a decade ago now) it was remarkable how much of the advice was still applicable. If you (yes, you reader) haven't read it before you should do so. It's only 200 pages or so, mostly short articles so it's not a difficult read.
- pjmlp 1y agoI see this all the time to this day.
- crazygringo 1y ago"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.
- bonsai_bar 1y agoGotta love that SWE arrogance.
- sillywabbit 1y agoAs opposed to the person who watched Star Trek and thought scribbling down something they saw on that counted as having vision.
- hopelite 1y agoChildren! Children! Stop fighting. We can all get along.
- gregorygoc 1y agoWhat is so arrogant in expressing first-hand experiences?
- LtWorf 1y agoNew account with negative karma… probably just created to post similar "hot takes"
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- gregorygoc 1y agoDeeply flawed analogy. Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs. Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.
- pjmlp 1y ago
- dcreater 1y agoThe PM discipline has unfortunately maldeveloped as a place for souless MBAs, engineering degree holders who dont want to be engineers or both. Actual Product people are a small minority Its a tragedy as its undervalued - I firmly believe apples products are significantly worse if their engineers led it. Jobs made those products
- jayd16 1y agoEven the nomenclature is malevolently vague. PM conflates product management with project management and they are not the same.
- dataflow 1y agoDon't forget program management.
- LtWorf 1y agoBut what's the difference? Does anyone actually know?
- pjmlp 1y agoYes, before MBAs took over, project management was more related to actually what happens in the project, GANT charts, stuff like Microsoft Project, resourcing team, setting the overall plan what goes where, who's available, when are vacations allowed,... Product management was interfacing with the client, understanding what is actually supposed to be built as vision, understanding UI/UX before that became a field of its own, coordinating usability sessions, and so forth. Naturally they have common touch points like what is possible from the vision, given the actual budget and available resources, expectation management and what not.
- dcreater 1y agoProduct Management = Big picture product vision. Features and Priorities. Market trends/strategy, Voice of customer Project Management = Day to day to execution, logistics, resources, schedules. Scheduling meetings, sending out meeting minutes etc Program Management = Team management towards delivering business goals/product launches on schedule Where its tricky is the differentiation between project and program management. IMO we dont really need both terms or both roles, causes uneccessary/unnatural separation of responsibilities
- lr4444lr 1y agoI am sorry you've had only negative experiences. Most of mine with PMs were negative as well, but a good one is a dragon slayer and bottleneck unclogger. They feel not like your manager, but like your servant, listening to exactly what you need, relaying messages accurately from other teams of what they need from you, and with the big picture perspective required for you not just to fulfill the task, but do it in a long-term strategically productive way.
- JoniDS 1y agoWhen you get a PM with this mindset, it's great, it immediately brings benefits to the team. Unfortunately they are a minority.
- hopelite 1y agoI suspect what you are really lamenting is the effects of poor leadership that does not grant a "product manager" (which is really a misnomer) the authority and autonomy to be a "product manager". As you imply, that role is really more a director role, not a manager role. A manager managers, a director directs, including the vision and product market fit. Most Product Managers I see do not have that authority at all, and at best are constantly having to convince "leadership" like some door-to-door salesman, rather than simply updating leadership in an advise and consent format.
- o11ywhisperer 1y agoAs a Product Manager (not Program or Project), this has been my lived experience of the devolution of the profession. We want PMs to understand the market, the tech, the customer, and the economic value of building a product. We then ask them to tell us when it will be built, down to the discrete feature and function, be a technical expert for the field and engineering in the product space, ask them to convey the roadmap and timeline to customers and prospects, build reports about everything from utilization to capacity, save deals by changing timelines for “just this one feature”, participate in product marketing, and understand how their product space co-exists in the complex product offerings from a company. “You are the Chief Product Officer for your product!” is the promise and rallying cry. That’s not an accurate description of what most PMs do and even fewer are capable of doing.
- bryanrasmussen 1y ago> Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. well, in my experience as a developer integration between different systems with different views about how things should work is often the most challenging part of the job, so what you describe sounds like it would be difficult.
- pdhborges 1y agoIn my experience PMs often work at a very high level. How things shold work are defined in a incosistent way when we take into account all the user flows, subtelness and restrictions of other systems. So programmers end up doing a significant chunk of the work by refining the specs so that the thing actually makes sense.
- mathiaspoint 1y agoI think what will actually happen is future PMs will be past engineers (or trained the way we train engineers now.)
- akdor1154 1y agoI have but only once, would work again with him in a heartbeat. Absolute gold when you find a good one. However your experience is not wrong: they're as rare as hens' teeth.
- exogenousdata 1y agoSame. Only one. And they were a real multiplier.
- icedchai 1y agoSame here. A PM that actually talked to the customer and the developers, could spec out features, design UI mockups... Incredibly rare.
- UncleMeat 1y agoI have worked with a few PMs that have been significant helps to my job but LLMs have completely destroyed my ability to work with them. "Oh I asked an AI to put together a demo for this idea and I presented it to leadership. When can you have it finished?" This is now a constant refrain, with LLMs seemingly convincing every PM I know that it is trivial to put together a reliable and maintainable system. "Oh let's just launch this and we'll fast follow with the maintainable infrastructure" and I want to blow my brains out.
- notnullorvoid 1y ago> never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.
- thescriptkiddie 1y agoi think product management is an unsolved problem. like there is a genuine need for the role, but we haven't figured out how to do it right yet.
- DanielHB 1y agoI have had a bad time with PMs and UX designers not actually understanding how the product works _right now_. How can you ask for changes if you don't understand how it works currently? Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.