Ask HN: Where did all the Product Managers go?

You completely misunderstand true product and project management, that much is apparent.

"Developers don't work well with customers"

Why does it have to be like that? This sort of silo thinking is probably what created the disconnect in the first place.

The customer might care about how things get done, if it means the difference between getting 85% of their wish list done or 50%, all depending on one obscure feature.

Agile/SCRUM can make the potential complexity of a feature more visible because it's a team estimate. It also can make the decision process less laggy because the customer/product owner sits in on the team. Finally it can make the end goal more visible to the Devs, resulting in less of a disconnect.

My 2p

Even if there aren't people who have "Product Manager" on their business cards there's going to be someone acting as a product manager.

In my possibly overly-simplistic view, PMs should generally focus on what the customer should be able to do, while developers should focus on how it's going to work. Of course, each group needs to be able to understand the position of the other to be useful. I'm worthless as a developer if I have no empathy towards for the customer (i.e. I shouldn't say "we're not going to implement this feature that would be useful to customers because it's too hard"), and PMs are useless if they don't understand the technical constraints of the existing code/infrastructure.

I'd say that PMs are less technical than developers, so developers can do the PM work if necessary (and should be thinking about it a little bit even if there are good PMs).

Project/Program Managers are different. Their job is more focused on making sure all the moving parts of a "project" are coordinated. When it's a small start up there aren't as many moving parts, so it's not a useful role - but in bigger companies it's useful to have someone coordinate between marketing, legal, finance, customer service, etc. And they can make sure everything happens on time.

You run into problems when developers don't care at all about customers, product managers have no sense of what's technically possible or reasonable, and project managers get too hung up on the process and not the final result. Avoid those situations and everyone adds value.

I've met a good PM or two.

Know how you tell a good PM? You think, "Thank God someone is doing that job. I'd hate to be doing it." They are bringing teams together and smoothing out rancor and NIH, getting agreement on things that are hard to get agreement on, researching things that nobody else has time to do, ensuring that Joe and Susan and Amhed are talking to each other regularly, and they know everything about the project, at least at a high level. They are technical as hell and you wonder why they aren't slinging code. You read the specs they've written and are just awe-struck by their technical depth and completeness.

Know how to tell a bad PM? You avoid them because they depress you and make you wish they didn't exist, because they subtract value from what you are doing. You go to their daily status meetings with a heavy feeling in your heart. You explain time after time to them that no, you can't use XML for that, that adding 12 programmers to the project won't bring in the schedule by six months, and that the slide deck they're giving to management in an hour has so many mistakes and fantastic assumptions that it might as well be crayon drawings by a three year old. The specs they write, if they exist at all, are mostly schedules and technical buzzwords and are useless. Typically, they love SharePoint.

Good PMs are very, very hard to find.

I sense a lot of hostility toward product managers here, and I don't know why. I could understand why, as a developer, someone would not want a bad product manager, but a good one should make a developer's life easier.

Developers are the ones who should be coming up with ideas about HOW to do things. Make something more efficient? Dev. Implement an incredible new technical feature? Dev.

Product Managers are the ones who talk to the customer and steward non-technical vision. They are the bridge between sales people—who are incentivized to say yes to every customer request—and developers—who in most cases do not have the time to be thinking about what a customer might want, doing customer interviews, etc. Product managers are there to avoid the lukewarm tea problem, to adhere to a coherent version of a product, and to help coordinate the many parties who have an interest in seeing a product succeed but who might have different perspectives on what that means.

Some places that have Product Managers (or Product Somethings (editors, gurus, swamis, whatever)): Apple, Google, Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Square (they exist, I know some who fill these roles), Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Spotify, and many others. These people not only exist but also are a central communication hub if they are doing their jobs right. Today's shining stars of PM are Apple (for hardware), Google, and Facebook. Everyone wants to hire people away from those teams.

The thing that bothers me about the other comments on this thread is the attitude of superiority that some people are taking: "if you aren't a dev/engineer/technical person, you aren't worth shit." Sure, in some companies, technical ability is all you need. But in most, particularly anything of reasonable size, you need a variety of people. Developers are not lawyers or finance people. In many cases, developers don't want to interview customers or aren't good at it. Developers are GREAT at developing (at least some are, others are complete clowns who have no ideas what they are doing), they chose to develop, but a company is so much more than development.

A great team--across all roles--is what makes a company great, and that includes product managers.