The product manager role is a mistake
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The product manager role is a mistake
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Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#2What a weird article. A whole lot of words to say, "hiring low performers will hurt your company"?
And the alternative is, "hire good people but not with the PM role"?
It reads like someone had a bad experience with a PM who thought they were Steve Jobs. PMs are just ordinary people, I don't understand this supposition that anyone holding the title is going be an entitled douchbag. An org can have thousands of PMs, each with a superior.
Just a weird article
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#3What a weird article. A whole lot of words to say, "hiring low performers will hurt your company"? And the alternative is, "hire good people but not with the PM role"? It reads like someone had a bad experience with a PM who thought they were Steve Jobs. PMs are just ordinary people, I don't understand this supposition that anyone holding the title is going be an entitled douchbag. An org can have thousands of PMs, e…
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Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#4TL;DR With or without the PM title or experience, hire smart people.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#5It's a fairly harsh take, as a whole, but there's parts of this that absolutely ring true. Once you get that "product org" in a company, it tends to progress the way the author describes, with committees and OKRs and review cycles and planning and a lot of bureaucracy.
I took, naively, a product manager job at one place I worked, thinking it would finally give me formal control over the product that I'd been previously asserting through influence - very successfully - in my client-facing sales engineering role. Of course as soon as I got in the chair I discovered it was a highly-constrained clerical job that I was completely unsuited to. Managing tickets and a backlog; coordinating decisions instead of making them; writing interminable powerpoint reports; the most creative thing was putting together a process for the company to follow in formalizing its product roadmaps. I lasted six months before running away.
The function is quite useful in supplying some visibility into what's getting built and in managing conflicting priorities for a growing product, but one thing it is not is shaping or controlling the evolution of the product in any way. It's a sorting, filtering, and (if you're lucky) a data collection function, producing an auditable decision trail and an impression of maturity in decision making which helps the MBAs higher up sleep a little easier.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#6I am living the reality described by the article. The PM role has too much power and too little accountability if things go south. The usual scrape goats are sales, then engineering and support.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#7Meh, the article's solution smells like great man theory.
> Tremendous people envision alternative realities, fully commit themselves to their work, and move mountains with their willpower.
The last part is so reductive. It's not willpower moving mountains. It's the underlings actually making the vision come to pass. At most the "great person" is aligning the incentives to motivate the actual doers and experts.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#8> You hire everyday great people. Each one needs to be great at something, obsessed by their craft, and driven by quality. You then put them together in a team, without individual responsibilities, ensuring that there’s minimal overlap in areas of greatness.
My current company is full of smart people, and (for a variety of reasons) we don't have product managers. It sucks. What happens is that the things a PM does do not get done. Very few engineers want to maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features, manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation, and so on. So it doesn't get done. That's what happens there.
At my last company, where I worked for about a year, I had three product managers. Two of them were fired because they were incompetent. One was really, really good (tremendous, in the parlance of this article). Our team still got more done in a year with a fraction of a good PM than my current company has gotten done in over two years without any PMs.
I agree with one thing: there aren't enough good PMs to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good product manager scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre PMs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones. The problem we are dealing with is that the software industry did not scale linearly, it exploded exponentially, and it needed 100x the number of people wearing the PM hat than there were actual, bonafide PMs in the world.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#9Apple never had product managers while Steve Jobs was alive.
The closest they had was Steve Jobs and Product MARKETING Managers, which are quite different than Product Managers.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#10Apple never had product managers while Steve Jobs was alive. The closest they had was Steve Jobs and Product MARKETING Managers, which are quite different than Product Managers.
Steve Jobs and his inner circle were, arguably, the product managers