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Another ex-softie, from UX background, senior level. I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing (user flow, interactions) features. They are nev
by 0987612345 11y ago
Another ex-softie, from UX background, senior level.
I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing (user flow, interactions) features. They are never trained for that in their academics, at the time of hiring they are never quizzed on that (if they are then its on the whims of individual interviewer). And absolute worst is some of them are not even very passionate about it but they end up doing because their manager expects them to.
Most of the time they come in the way of designers - that is the good part. The bad part is when they take ownership of UX design and the design team has to constantly struggle to get their inputs in.
Universally at Microsoft PMs are seen as the ‘owner’ for the UX design, since they write the ‘specs’. The ‘Spec’ (specification document) is compilation of screenshots from design team in a word documents with a narration of the flow.
In places like Office there are so many PMs that many a times there will be a spec documents for dialog boxes.
A notorious team in Office (where E. Chisa worked) is the OneNote, that team used to take pride till couple of years back that they don’t have any designers, all UX design is done by PMs.
No wonder EverNote came out of no where and steamrolled them (I’m personally a big fan of OneNote for its feature set, but hate the User Experience).
To me Microsoft’s biggest bane is the PM discipline, they are holding back MS on taking up Apple, Google to new startups (whenever MS engg team was design driven - Ex. Windows Phone - it came out with great products). The PM discipline used to make sense 20 years back, but not now to the extent that one would have 10-12 PMs for a dev team of 40-50.
- edgyswingset 11y agoAs someone who's about to start as a PM at MSFT soon... > I never understood why PMs are given the task of designing This is my biggest concern going forward. My background is developing backend services, not building good UIs. I'm confident in my ability to build something somewhat sensible (I have some Android and other UI experience), but fundamentally my strengths have always been in designing and piecing together abstractions with code. I feel like the largest roles of a PM should be in resolving ambiguity and enabling people who have good ideas. My current boss, while he could certainly code circles around me, doesn't actually write much code aside from a few unit tests. Instead, any time I wonder why something should be done a certain way, he can give me a reason and convince me it makes sense. When I have a good idea about how something should be done, he gets out of my way, checks up every few days, and removes any non-technical barriers so that it's as painless as possible for me. I believe that the system we work on would be in a horrible state very fast if he were to suddenly up and leave.
- melted 11y agoPMs at Microsoft by definition do not build anything. Nor do they really "design" anything. You can't design a piece of software unless you're an engineer. At best, they will give you some user scenarios to handle, and half of those will be complete bullshit that customers don't actually need and never actually asked for (this, my friends, is how you got Metro UX in Windows; for the record, I like it _as a phone UI_). If you want to build and design stuff, you need to be an engineer, not a bureaucrat. That's what engineers do. Here's what a typical PM does at Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV7u1VBhWCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV7u1VBhWCE
- edgyswingset 11y agoThis doesn't add anything to the discussion of PMs designing the UI for a feature. There are plenty of other wonderful places where bitching about PMs is a relevant contribution.
- melted 11y agoFunny, I'd rather "the UI for a feature" was designed by actual designers if I'm paying for it.