This article gets it wrong imho, it seems to think the problem is the caliber of the people, rather than the setup of the organization. In my 20 years of experience I've observed most people are willing and ready to push themselves to great heights. But the setup of most organizations doesn't support such levels of independence or freedom of operation. Also a big reason why so many people are drawn to startups.
The product manager role is a mistake
91–100 of 370 posts
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#92As a solo founder and dev I think the Product Manager complexity dwarfs Development work. For example, in the code I can search for all usages of something. But when spec'ing out I have to keep track of many things and their orthogonality at once.
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Here is a nice story from a former MS Excel's Program Manager
"My First BillG Review" by Joel Spolsky
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#93>Actually, take a minute to think hard, and come up with one product manager that achieved anything comparable to these folks.
Andy Jassy started as a product manager at Amazon and is now CEO of Amazon. Product thinking and working backwards from customer needs (and not forward from technology), is not just a big-tech concept, but applicable to every business big or small.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#94More 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.…
> An organization must be smart enough to let that people grow and thrive.
Agree 100%, but this is where I've seen a lot of organizations fail, especially large ones.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#95The article gets it backwards for large companies. Most of these things exist at the behest of leadership. In the absence of a PM, these responsibilities often fall on engineering managers or engineers.
There are two types of effective PMs in my experience: the visionary who shapes the product, and the exceptional "team cat herder" who adeptly manages outward from the team: KPIs, regulatory reviews, and similar things. Whether this person should have a different title is irrelevant: That's the title they have and the role they take.
When a PM like that departs, these duties don't vanish; instead, they often become the responsibility of engineers, adding to their workload.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#96The examples of “tremendous people,” we all have to acknowledge that we want to be like are all white, cis-het men. A good deal of the modern ones we know are assholes. And many of them are not that great at much of anything; it was privilege (and no small amount of luck) that got them where they ended up and myth making like the kind in this article that people aspire to.
That’s a silly bar to put before hiring someone to be a product manager.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#97> 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…
> maintain relationships with customers, interview users to identify potential features
Those are the marketing people. On most places they are stupidly completely focused on sales, but that's not ideal.
Product management is also a task for those people, but singlemindly focusing them on PM is about as bad as doing that for sales.
> manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation
And those are management tasks. It makes no sense at all to give both sets of tasks to the same set of people.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#98Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Customers are rarely able to express their underlying issue. They usually communicate what they think the solution is.
A good product person is able to drill down to the fundamental problem the customer really has and articulate that to engineers.
Also, good product people should be evaluating the customers problem in terms of the whole market.
After all, engineering is a limited resource. So you need to solve the problems that exist for your target market, not just a single customer.
Of course, I’ve seen good engineers who can do this, but it takes time and effort to sift through all of the customers issues and work out which ones to solve. So product managers are focused on this to free up the good engineers to design solutions to those problems.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#100You might not need a dedicated product manager at all companies, but someone needs to embrace and act as it. In some situations I have gladly taken that role, in other not.
I would say this more aggressively, product manager shouldn't be a specific role at any company. Someone needs to do that work, but making a product manager role, who can be unable to do any of the actual tasks to make the product function, is a bad idea. It's just encouraging people to play politics, and discouraging people from playing politics is one of the most important things for any org.