Ask HN: Where did all the Product Managers go?

The trend towards having no Product Managers in an organization seems to be catching on. Stripe does not have PM folks. Nor does Square to an extent. When hired, the work is split between project management and passing the parcel between various departments of the company - engg/release readiness/sales etc. There was a time when Intuit was the shining star of PM training. Are there good product organizations? It seems like most are sales or engineering driven. And will this field even survive in the future?

Ha. When I saw this on the RSS feed, I thought you meant "where did all the good product managers go?"

Square has Product Editors.

Think about the roles of a PMM --- customer discovery, pricing/segmentation, roadmap.

In a single-product startup, which is what most startups are, the whole company is doing these jobs. Product/market fit might not be established, or might be just months old, so the people doing sales are also doing customer discovery. The management team is agonizing over pricing and isn't ready to delegate it. The CEO might be reading every commit, and the roadmap is obvious.

I was a PMM for a couple years, and the role was described by a friend to me as "president of the product". In an organization with multiple products, you can need that role; one person keeping track of every business facet of every product doesn't scale. But you don't delegate roles until you need to. Like Jason Fried recommends (paraphrasing): hire when you've gotten so good at a role that you're tired and can't keep up with it anymore.

Well, I for once am hoping they don't all come back to haunt me!

I've rarely met a good one. In most agency style environments PMs are responsible for the messes that will have to be picked up by the devs, having promised the world and are unable to backtrack on any of it "because the customer has already agreed to it". I'd rather talk to someone about what they want out of their product and then let them make an informed decision where they can weigh up cost and impact of a certain feature. After all it's their money.