Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

damilolaa.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 122 posts

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

#71

Post by gowld »

catmanjan wrote: post #37
axlee wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personnally appreciate someone making the rounds around all the stakeholders, booking meetings for me, finding who do I need to talk to to get a domain-specific answer, reporting to stakeholders on the progress, and more generally navigating the organization on my behalf. This stuff is just too time consuming to tackle on top of a development role, especially in a larger org. note: we are a product organization, no…

I suspect customer as product owner works really well for consulting, imagine all the billable hours

Only if customer is someone like a government who doesn't care about getting a result.

If the customer cares, letting them flail and fail is recipe for heartbreak, unpaid bills, and lawsuits.

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

#72

Post by stvswn »

As a PM at a large tech company, I often describe the value of my role as this: we pay engineers a lot of money for their specialized skills. It is great if they can meet with customers, but that can't be 50% of their time, or even 25%. Even worse, they should not be spending their time communicating to executives via slide decks, writing documents for the sales teams, meeting with lawyers, meeting with other teams to negotiate turf battles -- etc., etc. Big companies need PMs because someone has to do all the "stuff." Yes, in the course of doing it, the PM gains some power to set the product strategy and roadmap -- by virtue of being the nexus of all the information -- but this is almost always done in close collaboration with the engineering team anyway. It makes no sense to compete with other companies for valuable engineers who can actually create software and then use up their time doing things that I can do for them. Someone who used to write code but now manages all of the business isn't an engineer anymore, he or she is a former engineer who is now a PM (or an executive perhaps), regardless of the job title.

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

#73

Post by gk1 »

polote wrote: post #58
notahacker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your product is B2B enterprise then your end users' delight at your UX might not matter very much, but you definitely want to understand the decision makers' interest in getting additional reporting/auditing tools and how much value [if any] they get from their staff being more accurate in using the tool...

The issue is most of the time the decision maker has no clue about that. In B2B enterprise the product is not a big part of the decision to buy or not.

This is an outdated stereotype about enterprise buyers.

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

#76

Post by ch4s3 »

ghaff wrote: post #57
saberdancer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely. I was a lead engineer on a product in a situation where we did not have a real product owner or a project manager. While I could manage the team and organize work, I struggled massively to come up with well defined and focused features for us to work. I would spend lot of time talking with different customers and trying to move that into development, but I was losing so much time I could have spen…

I was a PM in a long ago prior life and, at one point, we decided to bring development managers into more customer meetings. It wasn't a bad idea but they had their "day jobs" so would end up being only in a few meetings. So it ended up as almost mirroring sales where the last customer they spoke with was taken as gospel and a blueprint for what we ought to be doing. To one of the broader points, in both my personal…

I worked in a role in healthcare for a few years where I was the lead engineer and sat in on most customer meetings, and even did some field observations. It was an invaluable experience. It was super useful for disabusing me of certain notions I had about which features mattered. I learned a lot about product work from the experience and started asking myself and the team different questions during the development process.

I got to see a broad swath of users with pretty different needs, and learned a lot about how their clinics worked. It was really good for thinking concretely about tradeoffs.

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

#77

Post by gen220 »

grandvoye wrote: post #12
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…

The challenge I've had with that model is that as a company gets more complex, having someone whose sole job is to focus on the business technology interface is invaluable as people start to specialize. It's often more valuable to have engineers with (say) 6/10 expertise in the business and 10/10 expertise in their technology domain, working alongside PMs with 10/10 expertise in the business and 6/10 expertise in the…

Not intended as a rhetorical question, can you describe the dynamics of a long-term successful team where the PM had more business expertise than the engineer?

I agree with the division of labor you describe, in principle, but I've never had the opportunity to observe it in practice. Maybe I've only worked at places that are not old + big enough yet.

In the (relatively few!) teams I've known, the PM's business expertise has usually been strictly less than the most experienced engineer on the team, leading to a typically never-ending, and eventually abandoned game of catch-up.

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

#78

Post by dangrover »

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…

This was what I thought when I was an angsty engineer in early 20's, and I guess what motivated me to become a PM, where I realized it wasn't true.

Doing the PM job well -- being rigorous about the product, its goals, its strategy, customers, how it interfaces with the external world, and figuring out how to distill that down internally to empower your team -- takes as much intellectual horsepower as engineering. I had to stop writing code every day to realize how deeply complex and interesting the non-code world can actually be. A good example is the passage in "Superpumped" about how Travis Kalanik validated the idea for Uber with deep research. It's not just bullshitting through meetings.

I think the issue though is that, unlike eng, there is no obvious intellectual "floor" for PMs (equivalent of fizzbuzz for programming), so you've probably dealt with lots of bad, lazy, incapable ones.

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

#79

Post by alexpetralia »

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 have alternatively heard this distinguished as:

- UX Product Managers (close to users)

- Technical Product Managers (close to developers)

I've written about this a little bit here for the curious: https://alexpetralia.com/posts/2019/10/14/product-management...

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

#80

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

calciphus wrote: post #11
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…

That sounds like you had several people to do one person's job, not like it's a job that doesn't need to be done. Solid UX people think like product people, but you either over-burden them, have them shift part of their roles off to others (research, user testing, etc),or do both jobs poorly. Good product people not also doing design, research, technical work, etc...they should be able to manage several teams / proje…

Yep.

This all sounds nice, but developers/designers rarely want to do PM work. The PM position is as much a creation of developers who don't want to interact as it is management.

Even developers that do don't want to spend all day in meetings. A PM can help there.

Post reply on HN