One thing I have consistently noticed that a mindset as a PM for any role goes a long way. This is why I am creating a "Think Like A PM 101" course that you can find here. https://www.pmacademy.co/offers/6MZoGJ9Y/checkout
Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
51–60 of 84 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#52Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#53We 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.
Maybe not opinionated, but they should definitely be decisive. I've seen too many PMs just funnel every user request straight to implementation. No thought or care given to what the product should be or do. It ends up being a collection of poorly thought out functionality.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#54My 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…
We ended up going with the approach of bringing in dedicated Product Operations people who act as Product Owners for the Scrum Team and also interface w/other stakeholders. That's also worked pretty well once they got up to speed.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#55People like to point to shining examples of Product Managers adding huge amounts of value. They are like Unicorns, and you will probably never encounter one in your career. Moreover, many companies are unable to setup a hiring pipeline that can reliably detect such individuals. So hiring for the role Product Manager is a net negative for most companies, because their odds of hiring a good one are basically 0.
The result is that Product Manager is mostly an imposter role. It's created by charismatic "business" people to insert themselves into an area of value creation. They are attracted to the light and heat that tech has been giving off. Once they are in, they promulgate the idea that the role is absolutely necessary for success and create more demand for hiring similar imposter roles. The necessity of these roles is now part of the conventional wisdom.
As an imposter role, anyone well liked, with enough confidence can pivot into it. Areas with clear metrics for success like demand generation have seen cuts. But the success of a product manager is more difficult to quantify, and so it's a good place to jump to.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#56I 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?
This is far from universally true. If it's junior dev to PM then it makes sense you are defining the work of large swathes of people. That said, one of my pet peeves is junior PMs because the role requires significant skill, expertise, judgement and maturity. If you're just talking in meetings you're doing it wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#57In 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…
PMs are such a hit or miss. I have not seen an average PM in my career. They either are incredibly talented and they can move mountains out of the way of making a great product, or they are a complete black hole of resources focusing on gantt charts and project updates.
Are you talking about product managers or project managers?
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#58Managing people is where the real money is vs. say, straight programming
Product management isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a people management position. It’s a cross between inbound marketing, product design, and high-level prioritization/planning. Done well, it’s essential to creating products people love. Unfortunately, it’s easy to do poorly. Done poorly, it looks like bad project management: shuffling Gantt charts and micromanaging engineers.
Reading this thread had me questioning my own understanding of what a Product Manager is. Engineering has little day-to-day involvement with the product managers as they are busy working with customers, setting roadmaps, and determining requirements for products. Interactions are typically to demo what we have built, get feedback on a new feature or deviation from the product requirements, or in a weekly status update meeting.
A lot of people here are describing a position I would just call project management with a bit of technical management thrown in.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#59Not 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…
This is something I think about a lot as a product manager (PdM). There is only 1 PdM per a handful of engineers. In some cases, a product manager has more than one product (and team). From a numbers standpoint, I often wonder if I'd be better off going back to engineering. I wasn't the best at writing code—I was slow—but I enjoyed the challenges. The grass is always greener, I suppose.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
"opinionated" is the last thing you want in a PM. PM's job is to listen to users, and collect data.
Maybe not opinionated, but they should definitely be decisive. I've seen too many PMs just funnel every user request straight to implementation. No thought or care given to what the product should be or do. It ends up being a collection of poorly thought out functionality.
Exactly. Opinions are what link the product vision to the users. They matter, and if you don't have them it shows up in the form of a bloated, unfocused, and often biggy system. Put another way, opinions are regularizers. Products without opinions and vision can be successful, but if you're only ever reactive to user requests, you'll never truly push into new capabilities.