Managing people is where the real money is vs. say, straight programming
While as a product owner I'm not primarily a people leader (although I do) I got a significant pay bump switching from a lead engineer to a product owner at my company.
Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
41–50 of 84 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#42We really struggle to find good PMs. I've noticed a proliferation of low quality PMs (they don't really understand the product; they just act ask a secretary for technical leads and/or users). In particular, I wish we had more opinionated , less passive PMs.
"opinionated" is the last thing you want in a PM. PM's job is to listen to users, and collect data.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#43In 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…
|| When lots of people take some courses and switch to PM positions, well, Product suffers
This mirrors what happened with the rise of coding bootcamps. Another similarity between the two is the whole framework marketing machine.
I think its more related to tech becoming mainstream. A long time ago a lot of the people you met had a genuine interest in computing and then sort of fell into it as a career. Nowadays its fairly well plotted out like other fields, with all the baggage that comes along with that.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
plenty of engineers have created successful companies on their own. On the other hand there's literally never been a non-technical founder who created something because by definition if you don't have the technical skills you can't build something, even if you have a great idea or problem to solve
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#45I have another question: why does a PM make more than a dev? My wife made that jump and her salary went up 50%. She literally just goes to meetings and talks now, yet she makes more than her old job that required real skills. Am I the only person who finds this perverse?
a good PM or Manager has much higher value than a good coder. the problem is to be a good PM or Manager in tech you need not only good soft skills but also strong technical background. a lot of people in positions dont have either.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#46Product Manager sounds like a made up generic job title that covers everything from A-Q in the alphabet.
Product Manager is trifecta of project lead / product owner / customer contact person and some times even a software engineer
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#47Product owner/manager often works out fine as an informal position, where certain people in leadership roles are making decisions because they have an excellent aptitude for doing such; they especially have the ability to understand and empathize with their user base. That works fine until it stops working, and then it works horribly , because engineers have asserted themselves as antagonistic product owners: I know…
> And they just plain don't. Things can go completely insane. It boggles my mind how badly some otherwise competent folks can botch this.
This hit home with me, I’ve seen some of the smartest engineers fall into this trap. They seem to believe their great engineering skills translate directly to product management.
It can be one of the worst possible outcomes for a product and company
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#48I heard a statement before a lot of the big tech layoffs were in full swing: "There were a lot of low-interest rate product managers in tech over the past couple years." Don't get me wrong, I think product management is actually the hardest job in tech because it can straddle so many different areas: design, marketing, data analysis, customer relationships, project management, etc. etc. I still think great project ma…
Care to give more details about your third point?
I actually think this other comment on this thread says it best: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36326151. I've worked with a bunch of "Tom from Office Space" product managers in my career.
I've seen lots of product managers who basically just "facilitate" between stakeholders (e.g. between engineering, business execs, and customers) but don't actually add much value to the primary job of product management, which should be defining, in detail, how the product should actually work.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#49I heard a statement before a lot of the big tech layoffs were in full swing: "There were a lot of low-interest rate product managers in tech over the past couple years." Don't get me wrong, I think product management is actually the hardest job in tech because it can straddle so many different areas: design, marketing, data analysis, customer relationships, project management, etc. etc. I still think great project ma…
Care to give more details about your third point?
Secretaries only help create value insofar as they genuinely help take administrative workload off the shoulders of people whose skills are better put to use elsewhere. In the real world, you need engineers to communicate their own work, because there's a strong overlap between "people who can read and understand code" and "people who will earn more money with an engineering salary instead of a secretarial salary". By hiring someone else to push paper, you actually impede communication rather than improve it, because now there's an unnecessary stakeholder in the middle.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#50This is a little scary to see as someone who is trying to switch industries and get into a product owner / manager position.
My background is very technical, but it's in the traditional IT industry and I doubt anyone would trust me to start writing code even though that's what I've been doing for the past 2 years. So I figured with my project management experience I can jump more easily to product management.
From my perspective it does seem like there are still a lot of roles open for product people, so I can understand why it seems like a lot of people are trying to jump.