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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#71

Post by glimshe »

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…

It sounds like you had a project manager, not a product manager. A good product manager is very valuable.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#72

Post by ragestorm »

glimshe wrote: post #71
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…

It sounds like you had a project manager, not a product manager. A good product manager is very valuable.

Agree. Similar to a developer vs. SWE.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#73

Post by rsynnott »

> Do you know, though, what all the great people mentioned above have in common? None of them was a product manager. Not a single one.

Baffling argument. Not everyone has to be a visionary. Hire Picasso as your corporate lawyer, see how that works out for you.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#74

Post by ozim »

shapefrog wrote: post #50
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.

Because all the good ones are not looking for a job or at least not as often as bad ones. So it is hard to get good ones, you have to be lucky.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#75

Post by Belopolye »

Justsignedup wrote: post #61

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…

Advocating funding for a project budget and trying to involve stakeholders as well.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#77

Post by [deleted] »

semiquaver wrote: post #41
lazyasciiart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#78

Post by boredtofears »

ragestorm wrote: post #72
glimshe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you had a project manager, not a product manager. A good product manager is very valuable.

Agree. Similar to a developer vs. SWE.

there is no difference between a developer and an SWE except a fancy title

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#79

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Product Management is a hard job. You need to be technical enough to understand whats happening and have a bullshit detector, but high EQ enough to speak human. The dumb ones become sort-of project managers, tracking another set of books for tasks. The smart ones tend to deeply understand the business and move up or out. It's also a tough role to govern in that sometimes they get alot of credit for the work of others, or get no credit for anything and languish from a career pov.

When this role is dumped into engineering, engineering management or general management, it weakens the engineering practice. If I need engineers, I need to select for that ability and frankly shield them from people on the outside. If the org requires that my teams handle interaction, now I'm hiring people with mixed skillsets in one org, which inevitably waters down the engineering side.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#80

Post by willsmith72 »

ragestorm wrote: post #72
glimshe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you had a project manager, not a product manager. A good product manager is very valuable.

Agree. Similar to a developer vs. SWE.

Disagree. Project manager is extremely different to product. Dev vs SWE is completely arbitrary
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