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Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

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11–20 of 84 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#11

the position definitely exploded in recent years, but a lot of the cuts in the last few months have been these types of roles as well. Facebook called out non-technical managers pretty directly with Zuckerberg saying even managers should be writing code and I think other companies are realizing that many PMs are net negatives. At the end of the day it's a luxury position, the role in a smaller startup would be handle…

I'm pretty sure Tom "I take the specs to the engineers" Smykowski was something like a product manager in Office Space.

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#12
Making decisions on new features? Bad thing.

Doing the presentations and customer feedback on new features? Good thing. (Pls no I wanna die I'm a smol bean introvert dev it's the cost of knowing the Rule of Five I have no brain cells left to communicate I wanna die)

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#13
In a recession, where companies give up on the efficacy of their marketing and sales operations, a lot of those positions get cut. When a company merges or gets acquired (often, to improve financial metrics), that enables the company to cut a lot of marketing and sales positions.

Product is seen as a position that is seen as a bit more stable. The company still sells the product, current and potential users can still be interviewed, feature work still needs to be prioritized for developers, and various executives are loath to take over a position whose workload often feels like a lot of drudgery. So PMs are less likely to get laid off.

With that said, good PMs are worth their weight in gold, and most others are an anchor. When lots of people take some courses and switch to PM positions, well, Product suffers. Smart executives understand this and resist it. Unfortunately, most executives are not so smart... do the math.

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#14
Not something I've noticed, and honestly even if it is the case, there's a limit to the number of PMs out there just given that there's a practical minimum ratio of PMs to engineers.

With tech seeing layoffs and a drive for efficiency, right now we're definitely seeing the number of PM spots decrease. Also, in times of cost cutting, you can drive the ratio of engineers to PMs up - I just listened to Zuckerberg on Lex Friedman, and he said they had a ratio of ~3 reports to one manager before they started layoffs, and he wanted that to more than double. He was talking more about engineering management there, but I have to imagine the PM ratio would be similar.

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#16

Managing people is where the real money is vs. say, straight programming

Those who can, code; those who can't, tell people what to code.

Shit like this is why people mock programmer brain and they are right to.

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#18
In my experience, product management is an innate skill that is very hard to learn or teach. This is not to say that you can’t get better at it, just that it doesn’t involve the sorts of skills that are easy to teach in a classroom, it is more about real world experience. In order to be good at it, you need to be well organized, good at talking to people, have a good intuition for design, and a strong ability to understand the domain you are working in, as well as your users.

The best product managers I know seem to have a natural talent for it. And plenty of them found their way into it by accident. Maybe they were working in another part of the business, but realized that they had a knack for understanding how the product could be better. Maybe someone told them that they would be good at it.

My take on it is that yes, lots of people want to be involved in tech, but don’t know how to code. Product management is a Way to do that that’s accessible to non-engineers. Some people will try it out and find that they have strong abilities at it, and many will fail at it. But I think it is seen as a desirable job.

That said, I think it’s an incredibly hard job as well. You have to deal with people above you constantly pushing on deadlines, you have to stay super on top of things, and you won’t succeed, unless you earn the respect of the engineers you work with. It can be very demanding. Most people don’t seem to have the skill set for it. And if you are in a company with a bad culture, it can be a very thankless job.

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#19
post #3

The Big Con[0] book touches on this subject. Essentially, non technical people who want to insert themselves into technical projects account for many of the new PMs we see, at least in consulting, nowadays. [0] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-big-con

In security we see the compliance crowd sucking out all the air of the room.

Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?

#20
post #6

My current company has a lot of domain experts from a specific industry that became product managers. It's been a mixed bag of results. They're obviously very knowledgable about the market we serve, but completely naive to the process of making software products. Clarity and appropriate levels of detail in requirements definitions and creating coherent "products" vs. clumps of features are the biggest challenges. For…

I've seen this happen, and it can definitely work, but only if you've got someone really focused on training the PM skills. A PM who both has the core skillset and domain expertise is awesome, but trying to just drop someone in because they have domain expertise without the skills for the job itself generally turns out how you're describing.

In my view the most practical thing to do, if you can swing it, is to have a subject matter expert who's just a general resource for everybody. They help product make decisions about what to build, marketing with how to message and sales with closing the deals. We just brought somebody on in this capacity at my company, which is a startup in a highly regulated industry, and it's honestly just a dream setup for me as a PM. Things that would take me a lot of research or experimentation to figure out instead get answered in a 30 minute call.

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