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I 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?
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
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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?
The core problem I've seen is when the product manager sees the project management aspects of their role as their primary or only job. This is unfortunately incredibly common.
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
I think that it can be a mixed bag, especially depending on the size of your team and what you're trying to accomplish....and just as important - what role your PM actually fills on a day-to-day basis. PM has evolved to be a very vague description of many different needs a business actually has (some tech, some not) that nobody is specifically doing already.
My own experience as a PM - I worked at an education software startup. I was on a very small team with 3 engineers, a CTO, an operations person, and a CEO who was more of a market development / bizdev type of person. I was made PM almost by default. There was nobody regularly engaging with our users on a regular basis, nobody from our team actually using our product, nobody making sure we were building what we (and our customers) wanted to build, and nobody that understood the competition or the market we were serving. That's the PM role I filled - part tech, part biz, part UX, part design. My main value-add was that I knew the industry (and niche within the industry) well, and had personal experience at both sides of the product from a usecase prespective well before we even built it.
At other companies, this could be a much more limited role, or much greater role depending on the needs of the company.
I'm not super technical but have done coding bootcamps, know the right tech questions to ask, understand what engineers are capable of and how long things take; and most importantly - how to tell non-technical people to stop bothering the technical people. I do think PMs should be able to code, or at least know enough to ask questions, call out BS, know what's possible and what isn't, and how to get non-technical management to stop micro-managing the software development lifecycle. People skills are important too.
As I said earlier, PM has evolved into a catch-all that nobody can quite describe because it fills a slightly different niche at every different organization. The problem just gets worse when you hire fresh grads or people with 1-2 years of consulting experience who don't have any background whatsoever.
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
I get that. I think that it can be a mixed bag, especially depending on the size of your team and what you're trying to accomplish....and just as important - what role your PM actually fills on a day-to-day basis. PM has evolved to be a very vague description of many different needs a business actually has (some tech, some not) that nobody is specifically doing already. My own experience as a PM - I worked at an educ…
> The problem just gets worse when you hire fresh grads or people with 1-2 years of consulting experience who don't have any background whatsoever.
Yeah these are the culprits of the trend and the source of most rubbish PMs. The undefined is where these waste-chameleons lurk.
I highly suggest reading the aforementioned book (or even listening to the audio book).
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"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 this! My biggest tool as a PM was the ability to confidently communicate with our users and tell them "thanks for that suggestion, it's a good idea, but no we won't build that, and here's why" in a collaborative and positive manner so that our users will continue to use our product but understand why we are building what we are building, and why we have a very specific goal in mind.
PMs should almost work backwards - they need to have a product's goal and desired outcome communicated effectively to everyone from the get-to, and then understand what needs to be done from there. They should know enough about the business needs and market needs to be able to voice their opinion early on about what needs to get built, how it needs to get built, and why it needs to get built...and then leave the rest up to the technical people, with somewhat consistent feedback from users, stakeholders, and the market.
We 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.
The best product managers are engineers who care about what customers think, and have enough soft skills to talk to them. Even selecting from that pool, it's likely they will add less value as a PM vs as an engineer. In the case of hiring internally, at least they can fallback to being an engineer. Compare that to an imposter from the open market with poor domain knowledge, and no technical skills.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Product 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…