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We Need Fewer Product Managers

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Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#11

Post by prorsum »

kbos87 wrote: post #6

This is really a rant against management. Reading it reminds me of my way of thinking early in my career before I had encountered a good manager, and also really understood how hard it can be to get even well meaning people working on the right things and moving in the same direction. A collection of specialist individual contributors sounds great, but in practice, it just doesn't work.

We need good managers for sure. But I like the fact that the author is trying to draw a line between management practice and thought process.

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#13

Post by geofft »

lostcolony wrote: post #9
wgerard wrote: post #4

> We have roles (hats) for these things: project managers, UX, researchers, data scientists, business analysts, team managers, coaches, etc. Do product managers often wear these hats? Sure. Do you need a product manager to wear these hats? No. Yikes, some problems immediately spring to mind: 1) It's significantly more overhead (both financially and logistically) to have seven specialists doing the job that one genera…

"Herd those cats" - that's where "self organizing teams" come in. Turns out, most groups of people who are told "Hey, you're all accountable for (X). Work together on it" will actually work together. That includes figuring out what the business actually needs (not what they say they want), and what tradeoffs may be necessary. I've been on a project in the past that for most of its life had no product owner (or equiva…

What are your individual incentives and expectations, and who sets them? Who has the power to say "Look, this will be cheaper and better for the business if we spend $50,000 on this SaaS and 3 person-months of dev time integrating it instea of building it in house from scratch"? Are you all individually measured on value to the business and not engineering productivity?

My worry with unmanaged teams is that they work well when the right option, with all the data, is to just let some engineers do the engineering they're familiar with / excited about, and very poorly when that's not the right option. So if you don't know in advance which case you're in, you want someone who's able to herd the cats if necessary.

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#14

Post by kartickv »

Most teams I've worked on had a tech lead, a UX designer and a product manager. Why can't one of the first two people play the PM role? It's not as if being a PM takes up a person's whole time. In fact, on most of my teams, the PM was also the PM for a few other teams.

Having fewer people wastes less time in coordination.

I understand there would be some situations where you need a PM separate from other roles, but that shouldn't be the default. Just as most teams don't have an interaction designer, a visual designer, an animation designer, and a sound designer — all those are performed by one UX designer — most teams shouldn't have a separate PM.

Is there anything I'm missing?

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#15

Post by bradleyjg »

kbos87 wrote: post #6

This is really a rant against management. Reading it reminds me of my way of thinking early in my career before I had encountered a good manager, and also really understood how hard it can be to get even well meaning people working on the right things and moving in the same direction. A collection of specialist individual contributors sounds great, but in practice, it just doesn't work.

A regular manager is better than an amorphous product manager.

If your manager tells you to do X, it's pellucidly clear that you need to do X. That's the person that does your evaluation, can fire you, can maybe get you a raise or a bonus, that approves your vacations. If you think it is a bad idea, you can argue that with your manager. But at the end of the day, if you aren't convincing you are probably going to do X or start looking for a new job. On rare occasion maybe you can take the risky step of going over your manager's head, but it is unlikely to end well.

If a product manager tells you do X, is that an order? suggestion? request for a favor? If you don't agree that X is a good idea, what are your options? What if the product manager for product A tells you do X and the product manger for product B tells you to do Y?

I understand that companies on the one hand don't want a rigid system where cross functional teams communicate with each other solely by going up across and back down, but on the other hand don't like to have e.g. a programmer managed by someone that's never programmed. But a dotted line on an org chart are the corporate equivalent of code smell -- a problem waiting to happen.

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#16

Post by wgerard »

lostcolony wrote: post #9
wgerard wrote: post #4

> We have roles (hats) for these things: project managers, UX, researchers, data scientists, business analysts, team managers, coaches, etc. Do product managers often wear these hats? Sure. Do you need a product manager to wear these hats? No. Yikes, some problems immediately spring to mind: 1) It's significantly more overhead (both financially and logistically) to have seven specialists doing the job that one genera…

"Herd those cats" - that's where "self organizing teams" come in. Turns out, most groups of people who are told "Hey, you're all accountable for (X). Work together on it" will actually work together. That includes figuring out what the business actually needs (not what they say they want), and what tradeoffs may be necessary. I've been on a project in the past that for most of its life had no product owner (or equiva…

Yeah, I see your point and I've been on similar teams. But I think you're:

1) Drawing a lot of conclusions from a single data point (the project you were on)

I've been on teams like the one you're referring to as well. I've also been on teams full of great people who needed someone to manage all of those things. Some teams are better at self-organization than others, and I don't think it's a fatal flaw for a team not to be capable of that (to the extent that a business requires, anyway).

I've been on many more teams full of excellent people who were incredibly relieved to have someone else do all the organizational work, even if they themselves could've done it quite easily.

Organization is overhead. Your team lead was likely filling in the role of "product manager" even if it didn't seem like they were (and in fact, the great ones sometimes make it seem like they're not doing anything at all).

2) Misinterpreting my point

The article's suggesting more specialization, whereas it seems like you're arguing for less. The article is suggesting that the role of "product manager" should be split into multiple roles, whereas it seems like you think the role should be subsumed by developers and team leads.

Team organization becomes exponentially more difficult if your team is composed of many different roles and specialists. That's what I meant by "herd those cats".

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#17

Post by ryanbrunner »

wgerard wrote: post #4

> We have roles (hats) for these things: project managers, UX, researchers, data scientists, business analysts, team managers, coaches, etc. Do product managers often wear these hats? Sure. Do you need a product manager to wear these hats? No. Yikes, some problems immediately spring to mind: 1) It's significantly more overhead (both financially and logistically) to have seven specialists doing the job that one genera…

My takeaway from the article was less that you should have each one of those roles filled out with a dedicated person, but more that those roles can be fluid and accomplished by many people on the team. Developers and designers can talk to customers. You can experiment with bringing in representatives from customer success, sales, or whatever for the team to work with to analyze business requirements. Developer leads can manage the projects and meetings. There's cases where having a dedicated product manager helps with these, but keeping those roles fluid in the early days can be helpful.

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#18

Post by wgerard »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #17
wgerard wrote: post #4

> We have roles (hats) for these things: project managers, UX, researchers, data scientists, business analysts, team managers, coaches, etc. Do product managers often wear these hats? Sure. Do you need a product manager to wear these hats? No. Yikes, some problems immediately spring to mind: 1) It's significantly more overhead (both financially and logistically) to have seven specialists doing the job that one genera…

My takeaway from the article was less that you should have each one of those roles filled out with a dedicated person, but more that those roles can be fluid and accomplished by many people on the team. Developers and designers can talk to customers. You can experiment with bringing in representatives from customer success, sales, or whatever for the team to work with to analyze business requirements. Developer leads…

> My takeaway from the article was less that you should have each one of those roles filled out with a dedicated person, but more that those roles can be fluid and accomplished by many people on the team.

I guess that wasn't really my takeaway, and even if it was I wouldn't agree with it really.

Why it wasn't my takeaway is quotes like:

>> If you need advocates, evangelists, analysts, persona specialists, domain experts, coordinators, strategists, stakeholder herders, project drivers, etc. then hire them, and give them the right title

>> Consider hiring in apprentices/interns to fill “mixed” hats — research, data science, UX, etc.

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#19

Post by commandlinefan »

I've been coding professionally since 1992. I've witnessed the gradual decline of this profession from a fairly respected research-and-design type position to a clock-punching, time-tracking factory-assembly-type job - at least in the minds of the hordes of project/product managers who see their position as making sure that they squeeze every ounce of "productivity" out of the "lazy, slacking" programmers by accounting for every single minute spent in the office and making sure it matches up with an estimate from two months ago.

Re: We Need Fewer Product Managers

#20

Post by Myrmornis »

The piece is spot-on in that companies as they grow fill up with mid-level “PM”s who fill time with meetings. One problem with the article is companies don’t always use the P to mean product. They may distinguish Product and Program/Project, but the criticisms of the article, where not specifically about the word “product”, apply to the others.
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