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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#101

Post by musha68k »

> Picasso, Jeff Bezos, Mozart, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Thiel, Leonardo, and others are worshipped by the masses.

I hesitantly have to give Elon Musk credit for proliferation of EVs and - yes, highly questionable - because of finally completing DARPAnet’s original mission via starlink’s usage in ongoing Ukraine war… (yikes, lot of “offset” should IMO be considered; on many ”fronts” with his business ventures actually).

But for what should Peter Thiel be worshipped again? Especially in comparison with the rest of the list?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#102

Post by elicksaur »

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.

It seems like whoever named these titles did a poor job. They’re so close, can you blame people for not seeing a difference?

What is a product but a large project anyways?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#103

Post by samtho »

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.

With regards to hiring, this is tricky because all candidates will try to put their best food forward and have a reasonable explanation for everything on their resume. In addition, low performers can look like high performers if their experience was painted by working at places with low expectations. I’ve hired very high performing people who later admitted to being PIPed many times throughout their career but these places were either greatly dysfunctional and/or just not a good fit for them.

Additionally, high/low performance has little to do with competence in the role in my experience and hiring someone truly unqualified is very rare. Some of the lowest performing people (in the long-term) were the sharpest during the interview and I still consider very bright people. Higher performers can run the gambit but a lot of companies miss out of great talent because the prospective employee fumbles over a closed book, live coding challenge.

Lower performers typically have something else going on in their life (relationship problems, housing or living situation stressors, financial stress, family stress, undiagnosed/under-addressed mental health problems, etc) and maybe during another time in their life could very well have been very high performing.

My point is, when dealing with people, it’s complicated.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#104

Post by Twirrim »

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…

I've been lucky to work with a series of really good product managers, with one exception who thankfully didn't last long enough to do too much damage (though he did result in me having to attend the single most awkward meeting I've ever had to attend, where right from the top, and throughout the entire hour, he was demonstrating to his skip level manager that he really didn't understand the product at all, and the skip level did).

They help us out a lot by understanding what the customers want, what we can provide, what time lines are sane, handling interacting with legal and business interests galore, and I help them out when they need to check in on technical sides of things. Teams rarely lack for ideas of things they can build, ways they can improve the product or operational experience. A product manager tries to make sure you build the right thing.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#105

Post by marcosdumay »

sanderjd wrote: post #64
jpatt wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen competent project managers work very hard to achieve that neutral-value proposition. I haven't yet seen any one succeed.

In my experience, as soon as you decide your projects will be formal and managed, you are already doomed to that negative value.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#106

Post by snapetom »

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.

I had several companies where the PM were horrible, lost, and egotistical. I then ran into a company where the PM spent ten years as a developer for some popular game companies. That guy was worth his weight in gold.

Development was so much smoother. I didn't have to spend time explaining why we couldn't do this or that. He'd nix bad ideas at higher levels before it even hit us. We were given ample warning on how we approach things ("Custom B will want this, and if box what you're doing now it'll be harder blah blah blah").

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#107

Post by crazygringo »

breckenedge wrote: post #45
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.

> Talking to users has always been on my list of things required for engineers.

For any product of reasonable complexity, taking to users is something a PM should be spending ~1.5 days/wk on. Plus overseeing quantitative user research.

If your engineers are all spending that kind of time on users, that's slowing down the amount of time writing software by a huge amount.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#108

Post by xtracto »

BoxFour wrote: post #95

The 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 thing…

I'm just building a team for a SaaS b2b company where I'm the cto.

I'm going crazy doing iso27001 stuff, recruiting, devops, programming and product development.

Just recently I've hired people to help me in most of those roles, except Product Mgmt. So stuff like good API documentation, ordering of what tasks should devs do next, prioritizing of Bugs raised by QA , planning for the next features to implement, etc etc doesn't get done.

I've worked with great ProdMs and also Technical Project Managers (shoot out to MissionCloud, one of the best PMs I worked with, is a lady from there) . The are invaluable.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#109

Post by sanderjd »

sfteus wrote: post #57
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…

Definitely sounds like a bad PM experience, especially with the repeated insistence about handing control of the company over to the PM. Maybe I just have good experiences with PMs? At my company they're there to figure out what customers want and what the product should deliver, and then with our EMs to balance that with what's technically feasible and what we have capacity to implement. If an EM says "there's no wa…

Yeah the "handing control of the company over" thing struck me as odd as well. I haven't ever seen that particular problem.

In the good cases I've seen, it's just as you describe, with EMs and PMs working together with high trust to get to a decent level of consensus between them, and then parlaying that consensus into leadership buy in for their roadmap.

In the bad cases, there is some breakdown in trust between the EM, PM, or leadership. Or, worse, between the EM and their team.

But I haven't run into this thing where the PM reigns supreme, above the leadership team.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#110

Post by solatic »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #67
cmuguythrow wrote: post #39

Earlier 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.

Good Product people don't just build exactly what the customer described as their problem. They understand that sometimes there's a better way to solve it. In "engineering school", you can't tell your professor "I understand what you're actually trying to achieve, so I built X instead of Y because I think it'll be better for you".

Product figures out what to build, and Engineering figures out how.

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