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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#41

Post by semiquaver »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #29
karaterobot wrote: post #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 d…

In my experience: working with a good or great PM is fun and productive. Working without a PM is ok. Working with a bad PM is somewhere between irritating and infuriating.

Yep. A great PM is an amazing force multiplier. A bad PM drags the whole org down.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#42

Post by episiarch »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #7

Meh, 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.

Right, "at most" they are acting as Maxwell's demon. Useless.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#43

Post by allsunny »

Confusing article. “We should get rid of the PM role” but also “We still need people dedicated to do PM things… but don’t call them PMs, they’re just everyday great people.” I feel like the author had a bad experience working with a PM (the MBA comment is telling) and now wants to throw the baby out with the bath water. Business scale creates + requires role specialization. Sure, there are shitty PMs, and it’s a hard job, but I’d be super disappointed to lose my team’s PM.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#44

Post by albertgt »

Good things to watch out for, but also watch out for project or program running the show. For example, project sees it as a piece of work to churn, and program is trying to execute a multitude of projects.

Someone has got to care about the user and the business.

It can be much worse with a project manager who doesnt care about the user, doesnt care about the business and is just trying to complete tasks per sprint without any focus. It is even worse when the project or program manager has no technical background and doesnt understand what it takes to build something.

In each role, product, project, program, and all the other lead roles (technical), it takes people who really care.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#45

Post by breckenedge »

karaterobot wrote: post #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 d…

Are they really that smart if they’re ignoring those things? Talking to users has always been on my list of things required for engineers.

A decade+ of low-interest-rate fueled growth in the tech sector has meant a lot of us have succeeded just by showing up.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#46

Post by jpatt »

justinpombrio wrote: post #37
karaterobot wrote: post #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 d…

> 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 Ah, so that's what a product manager is supposed to do. When product managers were introduced at a company I worked at, they did very little of any of that. They certainly weren't speaking to customers. They weren't technical, so they w…

Sounds a lot more like a project or program manager than a product manager.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#47

Post by calvinmorrison »

karaterobot wrote: post #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 d…

Someone's gotta own the roadmap and prioritize the work queue, be it at a project level or updating the Microsoft project plan or the sprint. There's always a multitude of stakeholders. Devs, sales, marketing, ops, all have needs and idea. Someone must be the arbiter.

I operate as principle on a project, and I have opinions, but I cannot set the roadmap alone

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#48

Post by [deleted] »

robertlagrant wrote: post #38

Here's my solution: get (or be) a strong tech lead that can write tickets, negotiate features, and steer technical direction. They can optionally run the team as well, or that can have a separate person, who is still technical, in the team who keeps the trains running on time with meetings etc. The product person is slightly more distant; not in every meeting, and the tech lead makes sure work is synced with the prod…

[deleted]

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#49

Post by charles_f »

karaterobot wrote: post #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 d…

> 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

This is a great testimony. I think that stretching their capacity is a forcing function to stay high level and vision oriented, and avoid having PMs go too deep and start building up useless processes, or over-define features.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#50

Post by shapefrog »

willsmith72 wrote: post #2

What 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…

> "hiring low performers will hurt your company"

People who hire people just can't seem to help themselves but hire shit people, especially people who talk a lot about how they need process etc so it doesnt happen.

Day in day out, they always hire low performers, and I have no idea why. An untrained chimp with a stack of CVs would have a better strike rate.

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