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Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager vs. Product Owner

damilolaa.xyz

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

#101

Post by grandvoye »

gen220 wrote: post #77
grandvoye wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expert…

Hey good q. I work in enterprise SaaS and our team builds a fairly complex product. We have a range of technical and non-technical users within a given account, who use our product in different ways, and we have accounts that range in size from dozens to hundreds of thousands of employees with the differences in terms of usage patterns and needs that you'd expect. We also operate at high scale so our engineers need to know a lot about distributed systems and the integrations that our product has with other vendors/platforms/etc. We aren't unique in any of this from my experience.

(sorry for being somewhat vague but I try to keep this account anonymous!)

It's simply too much for our engineers to spend time deeply understanding every nuance of our business ("how should we make this product tradeoff between the needs of SMBs in Asia vs. the needs of our largest 10 customers across all countries? How will this then impact our pricing strategy?"). But PMs have more context here, because in exchange they don't (for example) know every nuance of how our data pipeline works.

In terms of how we make it work, we 1. try really, really hard to align incentives between Eng/PM so that they win together, 2. make sure that teams work together closely and have time to bond, and 3. write things down in planning docs as much as possible, as that's one of the best ways to reduce conflict and also fully leverage non-overlapping expertise.

"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."

That's rough... those don't sound like good PMs to me fwiw.

What I have seen are cases where very senior engineers have a better grasp of the overall product vision than some PMs, due to experience and tenure. But they usually don't have more expertise in all of the business questions simply due to relative lack of time spent in that domain.

***

All of this isn't to say that engineers don't need to know about the business, or that it isn't a huge advantage if they do (it is). Just that there are so many hours in the day and eventually you've gotta get some division of labor.

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

#102

Post by staysaasy »

DamilolaA wrote: post #22
grandvoye wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree but I don't think an individual can be 10/10 in both domains like you inferred. I think there will always be the need for a product person outside the engineers and developers.

Maybe I wasn't clear, but I specifically do not think that getting people to be 10/10 in all domains should be the goal – I agree with you. This is why you need PMs IMO.

Thanks for writing this post and generating this discussion.

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

#103

Post by ryandrake »

mathattack wrote: post #92
ryandrake wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the company. I worked for a small company that was a real clown show. Sales would come down to the engineering area and say things like "I just closed a huuuuuuge sale for the company. We need a product that does A, B, and C, now so we can deliver it!" And, that became engineering's scope for the next 4 weeks...

I’ve been at similar though 4 weeks would have been generous.

It would be 4 weeks because Sales told the customer that A, B, and C were already part of the product.

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

#104

Post by tootie »

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 hate to say it, but "empowering tech" is usually an anti-pattern. Technical work is done in service to business needs. The role of Product is to bridge that gap. Both pushing the tech team to focus on the most valuable work and explaining outwardly why a tech team might need to focus on quality or refactors instead of delivering features. It could be the same person the same way someone can be a doctor and a pilot, you'd just have a very hard time finding enough people who can do it all.

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

#105

Post by gen220 »

grandvoye wrote: post #101
gen220 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expert…

Hey good q. I work in enterprise SaaS and our team builds a fairly complex product. We have a range of technical and non-technical users within a given account, who use our product in different ways, and we have accounts that range in size from dozens to hundreds of thousands of employees with the differences in terms of usage patterns and needs that you'd expect. We also operate at high scale so our engineers need t…

Thank you for the super detailed response! It's illuminating.

For the product you're describing, it seems the division of labor is a no-brainer and highly-productive.

It seems there is a spectrum of maturity/complexity (correlated with age and scale), and depending on where your product falls along that spectrum, it either makes sense to have a PM "role", or not.

Additionally, it appears that the domain-relevant experience of the PM is a big factor. If a company is hiring to fill an org chart, rather than hiring to fit an expertise gap, it's more likely to end up with PMs in the scenario I describe. I suspect this is also correlated with age and scale.

Finally, I guess there are orgs that expect PMs to be (or become) business domain experts and orgs that expect PMs to be highly-educated secretary-task-masters, and these expectations weight the outcome.

In any case, thank you for sharing your experience, this was a very interesting snippet of insight!

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

#106

Post by ako »

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…

There's tons of stuff i do as a product manager that neither tech nor ux will do:

* Finding new customer needs that are not yet covered by the product (new products, so not existing product),

* determining how a product might address that need,

* determining the alternatives, competing products, customers may choose,

* the (financial) risk of not addressing the need,

* the business case of creating a new team to implement this need product/capability,

* the pricing of said new product,

* determining what the key product features of the competition are that we need to address to be able to win deals when in competition,

* and what features are relevant according to gartner, to ensure we're part of the short-list of potential customers

* determine how to prioritize product releases and features to ensure we can win markets (think crossing the chasm).

* ...

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

#107

Post by staysaasy »

gen220 wrote: post #105
grandvoye wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey good q. I work in enterprise SaaS and our team builds a fairly complex product. We have a range of technical and non-technical users within a given account, who use our product in different ways, and we have accounts that range in size from dozens to hundreds of thousands of employees with the differences in terms of usage patterns and needs that you'd expect. We also operate at high scale so our engineers need t…

Thank you for the super detailed response! It's illuminating. For the product you're describing, it seems the division of labor is a no-brainer and highly-productive. It seems there is a spectrum of maturity/complexity (correlated with age and scale), and depending on where your product falls along that spectrum, it either makes sense to have a PM "role", or not. Additionally, it appears that the domain-relevant expe…

No problem! A colleague and I actually write a lot about these types of topics (link in bio) if you're curious.

A few quick reactions:

"It seems there is a spectrum of maturity/complexity (correlated with age and scale)"

100%, I don't think that early stage companies really need PMs, and IMO PMs at early stages can be actively harmful by causing overhead / trying to make themselves useful and failing. At early stages the founders/engineers/designers/even some sales or support people should fill the necessary parts of product management. Product management at this stage can be more like a set of activities that produces good decisions, rather than a formal department.

(Fwiw the company I work at has many hundreds of employees)

"there are orgs that expect PMs to be (or become) business domain experts and orgs that expect PMs to be highly-educated secretary-task-masters"

Yeah, the latter is kind of terrible I think. If you need secretaries or task masters you should probably hire engineers/designers (and management) that can keep the trains running on time or set up mgmt processes to do so automatically. PMs ideally only get involved in project management because they have the skills and they're incentivized by outcomes to roll their sleeves up when needed, not because it's part of their core job.

Good PMs also don't want to primarily do admin project management work, so (to bring it all back to your first comment) you'll end up with crappy PMs who are strictly less knowledgeable than your engineers.

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

#108

Post by nicoburns »

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…

Agreed. But would add: as a developer my least favourite thing has been Product Managers who keep the customers exclusively to themselves. Requirements inevitably have a technical component to them, and getting the end users and developers together in a room and talking to each other directly is invaluable. It's so important that it's actually a key requirement to taking a job for me.

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

#109

Post by satyrnein »

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…

Usually when I hear this sentiment from a developer, it's not because the developer has a burning desire to run customer surveys, analyze top support requests, document byzantine business process, sit in 100 meetings, etc, themselves. It's because the imagined alternative is that the developer just does whatever they feel like, which is not the reality.

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

#110

Post by DamilolaA »

staysaasy wrote: post #102
DamilolaA wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I don't think an individual can be 10/10 in both domains like you inferred. I think there will always be the need for a product person outside the engineers and developers.

Maybe I wasn't clear, but I specifically do not think that getting people to be 10/10 in all domains should be the goal – I agree with you. This is why you need PMs IMO. Thanks for writing this post and generating this discussion.

Haha, I understand now. Thanks for reading.
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