Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner • Hacker News Board

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#41

Post by dayvough23 » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:13 AM UTC

rodelrod wrote: post #25

DamilolaA wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but how do you keep abreast of this best practice in times of COVID? Product Analytics might just be the life saver.

Product analytics may tell you what is happening, but they won't tell you why it's happening. To your question, I don't really have a good answer. From a B2B SaaS perspective, we try to complement analytics with a lot of video calls but that's not nearly as good as sitting next to people while they do the work.

Definitely not a replacement for watching people do their work but we've been using Cohere (https://cohere.so) to help us watch what our users are doing and how they're working.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#42

Post by bhaavan » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:15 AM UTC

harryf wrote: post #18

Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…

"Getting out of the building" in metmorphical send might give you view from people / customers you can visit. This is likely to be a biased sample, and unrepresentative of the true customer.

Running A/B tests is IMO, a good proxy, to understand customers unbiased binary views on feature changes, and objectively better.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#43

Post by ako » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:29 AM UTC

polote wrote: post #32

harryf wrote: post #18

Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…

> the key thing a product manager has to do is get out of the building. Well, no, that's the sales job. First being a product manager is different in every company. And second there is a lot of differences depending of the type of business you are working in. For example if you work in Saas b2b enterprise you can easily be a very good product manager and almost never meet the customers nor the users [1], because that…

No, sales goes to the customer when you have a product to sell. The product manager need to go to the customer to understand what they need, and what product needs to be created.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#44

Post by ako » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:31 AM UTC

DamilolaA wrote: post #20

harryf wrote: post #18

Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…

I agree but how do you keep abreast of this best practice in times of COVID? Product Analytics might just be the life saver.

Zoom, teams, etc. You can still talk to customers, and they can still show you what they are doing, and what they might need.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#45

Post by solidist » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:37 AM UTC

ihmo

pm: "watch this" po: "this over that" pjm: "predict this"

I haven't much experience with pmms. What are they like?

For those who are interested in what I observed in working with these roles: https://dev.to/solidi/what-is-a-product-manager-anyway-3pc4

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#46

Post by johnx123-up » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:42 AM UTC

greatgib wrote: post #27

All of that to transform developers and "software engineers" into stupid micro-managed monkeys, just good to write code. The worse is the product owner. Sadly the management world did profite of the hype of scrum to add this bullshit job but just a reminder:. It goes against the original concepts of Agile! In the original Agile the product owner is the customer, and the goal was to have the devs in direct contact wit…

Also, if I'm right, even in current Agile definitions, Product Manager is a customer facing role (Unlike the article comparison chart reads)

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#47

Post by madeofpalk » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:46 AM UTC

bhaavan wrote: post #42

harryf wrote: post #18

Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…

"Getting out of the building" in metmorphical send might give you view from people / customers you can visit. This is likely to be a biased sample, and unrepresentative of the true customer. Running A/B tests is IMO, a good proxy, to understand customers unbiased binary views on feature changes, and objectively better.

Talking to users lets you know what the problems are.

A/B tests let you know if you've solved the problem.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#48

Post by saberdancer » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:51 AM UTC

bhaavan wrote: post #42

harryf wrote: post #18

Having done all three roles either formally or informally (after 15 years development) the key thing a product manager has to do is follow Steve Blanks advice and get out of the building. OK not in times of COVID but there has to be someone who actually talks to customers or potential customers in person and builds _qualitative_ opinions / insight into what really needs to be built and where the real opportunities ar…

"Getting out of the building" in metmorphical send might give you view from people / customers you can visit. This is likely to be a biased sample, and unrepresentative of the true customer. Running A/B tests is IMO, a good proxy, to understand customers unbiased binary views on feature changes, and objectively better.

A/B tests work only for features you've built. You don't get insight into what customers say they want, you only can observe if they like what you built or not.

There is a use case for both.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#49

Post by k__ » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:54 AM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #4

That reminds me of the time I was heading the Product Management department of a large company. We had so many discussion about what a Product Owner, Manager, Technical Product Manager is. Their role. Their responsibilities. Endless discussion with much feelings involved about respect, ownership and so on. Nowadays I am convinced that a great company just doesn't need any PMs. It is way better to empower the tech and…

I think, you're right.

I'd even go as far as saying management roles aren't needed at all below the C-level.

The problem is that many companies already moved their engineers and designers away from the customer, and I think this model only works with small autonomous teams that talk direktly with customers.

Most engineers don't even want to talk with customers, they just want to solve what they think is the most important technical problem and be done with it.

Re: Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

#50

Post by detaro » Wed, Feb 03, 2021, 11:55 AM UTC

greatgib wrote: post #27

All of that to transform developers and "software engineers" into stupid micro-managed monkeys, just good to write code. The worse is the product owner. Sadly the management world did profite of the hype of scrum to add this bullshit job but just a reminder:. It goes against the original concepts of Agile! In the original Agile the product owner is the customer, and the goal was to have the devs in direct contact wit…

I don't agree that PO is a necessarily "bullshit job", because "the customer" is often a complex group with demands that need to be unified and prioritized. So there needs to be a standin for the that group in the dev team - that's the PO. As dev, I much rather have that be one person than a "comittee" of all the different customer aspects.