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During my time at Google, I definitely had the experience of "my" product being killed in preference to a competing product. In one case, I did not even know th
by ridiculous_fish 11y ago
During my time at Google, I definitely had the experience of "my" product being killed in preference to a competing product. In one case, I did not even know that the competing product existed until the public press release.
What was most frustrating is that the decisions did not seem to be motivated by product superiority. The "winner" was not a better product, or at least this was not demonstrated. Instead the decisions were driven by whichever product better aligned with the internal political winds this week, such as the tension between the Nexus partner model vs the Pixel in-house model. These "strategy shifts" were often preceded by senior leadership shakeups, which were themselves frequent.
It was hard to escape the conclusion that the quality of my work was irrelevant. It was demoralizing.
- gargarplex 11y agoYou're one of the most prolific and impressive programmers around. I'm sure you could have your choice of product manager...
- onedev 11y agowho is he/she?
- gargarplex 11y agoA true programmer's programmer. The author of the fish shell.
- smcl 11y agoTake a look at http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/will-it-optimize.html and more posts on that blog, some very interesting stuff there.
- threeseed 11y agoOffice politics unfortunately often wins over talent and results. And it's very hard for most people to recognise why certain things are happening within a company if you aren't immersed in the politics on a day to day basis.
- jackgavigan 11y agoIs it true that, at Google, product managers have to convince engineers to work on their product? For context, this answer on Quora[1] suggests that the product team does not report to the product manager and don't have to do anything they say, so the product manager has to convince people if she wants to get things done. 1: https://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-a-great-product-manager-at-Google/answer/Edward-Ho-1 https://www.quora.com/What-makes-someone-a-great-product-man...
- timdierks 11y agoEveryone is a volunteer. Not just at Google, but in many other situations as well. At Google, pretty much any of the engineers can go and get a job at another company whenever they want. So they tend to have access to internal mobility; Google would rather let them fill a different job at the company than have them quit. Thus, managers (either engineering managers or product managers) don't have a lot of coercive capability. The path to success is to not be a manager who forces people to do your bidding, it is to be a leader who persuades your colleagues of your vision. At times the tool of command can be used, but it's best used lightly. My goal is to be service-oriented: my job as a manager is to help my engineers be super-successful, and one of the ways I try to do that is by finding paths for the organization to build great software and leading my team and other teams to cooperating to build it.
- jackgavigan 11y agoWhat you've said is all great and admirable but it's also a bit aspirational and idealistic, and I'm left wondering: How do decisions get made? For example, let's say there's a list of ideas and suggestions for new functionality and fixes for a product - How does it get prioritised? By consensus? I can't help thinking that there's a risk that the priorities end up being the stuff that the engineers are most interested in working on - i.e. interesting problems and challenges get picked up enthusiastically, while boring, tedious bugs or usability fixes languish unresolved because nobody's particularly interested or enthused in spending time on them, when there's far more interesting/fun stuff to do.