The product manager role is a mistake • Hacker News Board

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#61

Post by Justsignedup » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

The thing about PMs. They fulfill a very specific need, and that need is hard to quantify, but I can tell you that without a good PM everything falls apart.

Here's a list of what they tend to do:

- gather information from users on what is/isn't working for them

- gather information from executives about what needs to be done to keep the company working

- gather information from industry leaders who may or may not be part of the company about where the industry is going

- work with design

- take all 4 previous points and distill them into what actually needs to be built for a needed feature

- work with engineering to figure out what is practical, vs not, for building, and how long approximately it will take

- work with engineers / higher ups to remove features that take time but don't add as much value.

- work with engineers to ensure estimation and team velocity is more or less predictable

I've probably already described a 1 and 1/2 jobs. Now if you take product away, each of the above gets distributed among the engineering team, and not everyone in that team is good at it. And even if they get to a good homeostasis, one person leaves and now there's a non-obvious gap that we're not interviewing for.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#62

Post by tsunamifury » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

I really struggle with this sentiment because I often agree with it, specifically at large companies.

At Google product managers became the worst aspect of the entire company. They spent their time arbitraging credit, cutting off communications between builders and executives, and generally appearing for a while, not taking ownership, then leaving after they fucked up the roadmap so badly they couldn’t fix it.

They became the worst kind of leech on the company.

But then in starting my own company, PMs who need to own, execute, and deliver on a triads goals has become invaluable. It shortens communication pathways and distributes responsibility.

So I dunno I’m at a loss.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#63

Post by satisfice » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

smugma wrote: post #9

Apple 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.

When I was at Apple (during the interregnum between Jobs’ reigns) we had people called product managers, but yeah they were mostly about getting the product to market and interacting with the market.

We had project managers who nominally controlled product design decisions. We had test managers in a separate testing directorate (I was one of those).

My experience was that the three managers worked together to define the product, with the product manager trying to represent the market, the project manager representing engineering, and test manager asking pointed questions.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#64

Post by sanderjd » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

jpatt wrote: post #46

justinpombrio wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep, a common pitfall is to not understand how product managers are supposed to do, and thus they just do project management, which often has neutral or negative value.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#65

Post by sanderjd » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:06 PM UTC

calvinmorrison wrote: post #47

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

If all you want is someone to do team-level project management toil, a line manager can do that (or hire them a part time assistant if they don't want to and you don't want to invest in better automation). This is not a whole career-level job.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#66

Post by rsynnott » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

allsunny wrote: post #43

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…

An extremely common organisational leadership failure mode is “[role/thing] is useless, get rid of it… Ooops, we actually needed that. Bring it back, but call it something else so that we don’t have to admit our mistake.”

The author has, apparently, decided to skip the intermediate step and just rename things for no reason.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#67

Post by AlotOfReading » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

cmuguythrow wrote: post #39

scrumper wrote: post #5

It'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…

Just to offer you another perspective: In all of the (B2C) companies in which I have worked as a PM (three, across two different industries), I have been closely involved in shaping and controlling the evolution of the product. My normal month has always consisted of creating anywhere from four to twelve unique proposals (PRDs) for new features for the company to build, with the number created varying based on the si…

Is that not a straight up engineering job? A good chunk of "engineer school" is practicing "customer has an issue, design a solution" type problems, in-between all the math.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#68

Post by boredemployee » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

Coming from a technical background, I am pursuing a career in product, and I sincerely believe that engineers generally dislike any activity linked to a product owner/manager. Interviewing clients, prioritizing, and navigating politics are soft skills that technical people usually don't want to develop. I didn't want to either until I received an offer that doubled my salary.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#69

Post by BHSPitMonkey » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

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.

This applies to colleagues in all roles, especially the ones with more authority.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#70

Post by Belopolye » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 5:10 PM UTC

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.

Been having this lately with one of our clients, and my impression is that more than one of these PMs have their role as a placeholder while something else is found for them to do.