I can't post a comment so I'll report a typo here:
"People are hired based on whether they’d represent no treat"
I think author means "threat".
The product manager role is a mistake
11–20 of 370 posts
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#12More than a dozen years in tech have taught me that roles are simply ways of expressing organizational wishes. You want someone who thinks about something as a product? You open a PM position. You want a team lead? Here's an EM position. Job titles are elements of fiction that allow us to play that RPG called work under different angles. What you ultimately bring to work is your unique mix of talents and experience.
Some people will often break the boundaries of those roles, though, and that's ok. They have ideas and might even come up with their own job titles. An organization must be smart enough to let that people grow and thrive. That doesn't mean one cannot thrive as a PM, or do great work; it's just that an organization usually cannot invest time in deeply knowing who they're getting onboard and so offer precooked roles.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#13Apple 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
And that's how it should work. The article is poorly written, but it does suggest more ownership from roles such as "area leads" which is close to Apple, I guess. With Jobs being the Uber Lead.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#14It'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 previous…
I agree. So, I think the question is, how do you effectively implement stewardship and accountability on product matters without having an organization strictly dedicated to it? The author doesn’t give much of a framework here
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#15Don't hate the player, hate the game… PMs are just doing exactly what leadership has asked them to do.
The real problem is unrealistic roadmaps filled with top-down strategic initiatives which are often made up by leadership with very little rigor—all in the pursuit of growth at any cost. The bad PM is an emergent property of that system.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#16It'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 previous…
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Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#17Alot of PMs want the job for the wrong reasons or are generally misguided. They want control, believe they are a visionary, use it for stepping stone to be a 'founder' one day, etc. Also, there's a trend of meh junior software developers clamoring to become PMs. I think they found out the recruiting recipe from FAANG where if you have a CS degree and a few years of engineering experience, you'll be recruited into a PM role where you won't have to code or look at a terminal again.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#18I 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.
That sounds like a very painful situation. But this is a problem with the organization and/or the individual product managers, rather than the role.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#19 - Why is a company equated with one product?
- Without a "product manager", or, since I prefer scrum terminology, "product owner", who determines the direction of the product development? Who decides what the most important thing to work next is, and where to focus company resources? Who is responsible for making sure that the product is valuable, and that whatever developers work at any given moment serves to maximize its value?
- Without a single "product manager"/"product owner", who decides which of the multiple competing requests to the team takes the first priority?
- With the attitude of "hire everyday great people; each one needs to be great at something; you then put them together in a team", how do make sure that individuals you put on a team work toward a single goal, as a team?Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#20I was ready to hate this article based on the title - I presumed it was a typical "PMs are dumb, all your company needs is smart engineers who rule the world" piece. But it wasn't that, and the author nails the problem pretty much perfectly.
But: The author hand-waves the solution into oblivion:
"There’s an alternative model that works. 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. And you pay them to have fun doing what they love doing, in exchange for putting their time and skills at the service of your company."
I mean, come on. That sounds lovely but can anyone point to a successful company larger than 100 people where that actually works in practice? (HOW could it work in practice?)