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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#121

Post by granshaw »

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.

This doesn’t sound like any university CS degree I know of, apart from maybe a single class actually called “software engineering”, which in many cases isn’t even required

And even if it was, no, engineer personalities are horrible at designing solutions that actually meet customers’ and the business’s needs

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#122

Post by huytersd »

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…

PMs at most companies DO NOT play politics for resource management, the stakeholders are frequently just other departments within the company so there isn’t a lot of maintaining client relationships. TPMs with sales people are generally the ones that maintain relationships with clients. PMs do very little besides put out a high level requirement document that then truly gets fleshed out by the engineering team and the EMs.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#123

Post by midasuni »

elicksaur wrote: post #102
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.

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?

My company had project managers and product owners to avoid that verbal confusion.

A project has a defined start and end. You know when it’s done, and you should know that before it even starts.

A product is ongoing. It reacts to business changes.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#124

Post by yellow_mixer »

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…

What you are describing sounds like a Technical Product Manager, not a tech lead. The minute you have them “run a team”, you are combining both roles into one.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#125

Post by mkl95 »

Product managers are great when they actually manage the product. I've worked with 6 or 7 so far, and most of them seem to be better at playing corporate politics and discussing random stuff with their bosses than at describing accurately what they want you to build.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#128

Post by snapetom »

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…

Every thing you just said rings true. I went from 20 years engineering into engineering management, and took my first PM role last year. I took the role at a twenty year-old software company that's never had good product management, and the place is horrible.

Over and over, the staff were pounded with "we are an engineering first company." Well, that means the engineering teams were allowed to do whatever the hell they wanted and chase the shiny newest techs. There's 3.5 main products (really 4.5) each made from a different tech stack. There's another eight or so legacy products we have to support due to legacy demands. There's no inter-operability of standardization between products. Basically, there's no knowledge transfer, so the cost of development is through the roof.

Twice this year, I had to explain to 20 year-tenure engineers that don't understand why it's a bad thing that one API is TLS 1.3 only, another is 1.x, and another doesn't even require TLS.

Customers hate us. For my product, they literally wrote the marketing materials first, and let the engineers figure it out. One stage of my product takes Oracle data and puts it into parquet. The guys who did it did it in three different languages, two other DBs inbetween (MySQL AND PG), and was going to introduce Redis before I stopped the insanity. Everything is fragile and sucks.

Thankfully, PE took over two years ago and we now have an ultimatum to make money or else. We are a twenty year old company that has never made money (we've been a cost center). Even if we don't meet it, I feel like the Universe will be better off without the travesties against software design that we created.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#129

Post by alienlid »

shostack wrote: post #88
Spooky23 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really hope you're not implying that project managers are or need to be less smart than product managers. They are different disciplines, and like any profession there's likely more people who are not good at it than people that are. But I've worked with great visionary product people and excellent project and program managers (and strive to be one every day myself). Neither could do the other's job well or effecti…

Project managers usually don't need to know as much as product managers, or be as thoughtful as them to be a great value add. Project managers have a larger range of "acceptable" performance to be able to add value, so their job certainly is easier.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#130

Post by koonsolo »

starky wrote: post #89
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.

Last time I saw one of these types of articles on here it quickly became apparent that a lot of companies don't know the difference and call their project managers by the wrong name.

People using "PM" is adding to the confusion.
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