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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#131

Post by jsdwarf »

Boah... fallacies everywhere in this piece. Let's start:

> Picasso, Jeff Bezos, Mozart, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Thiel, Leonardo [... would be amazing PMs]

I beg to differ. Mozart died at 35, completely indebted after years of excess drinking. Jobs ousted from his own company after poor strategic decisions and intolerable behaviour. Picasso / Leonardo were geniuses of their own without need for co-workers.

> None of them [geniuses mentioned before] were motivated by OKRs, KPIs, data, or other people’s opinion.

Wrong. We know from another genius, Kurt Gödel, that even intellectually brilliant people struggle with procrastination. In Gödel's notebooks we find a multidimensional planning system (goals for the day, week, quarter, next year) and clear OKRs ("finish preparation of Princeton lecture until end of this month").

> The enormous mistake you can make is to adopt a model that requires tremendous people, without having these tremendous people.

Again wrong. Great discoveries are made by employing great discipline over a long time, not by hiring some rock stars. Why else would Elon Musk call one of his most ambitious ventures "the boring company"? Why else was Katalin Kariko, who "invented" the Covid-19-vaccine and received the nobel prize for Medicine in 2023 ousted twice from Penn University, because her research was deemed "not sexy enough" for grants?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#132

Post by midasuni »

marcosdumay wrote: post #105
sanderjd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes you need a formal project. We’re kitting out a new office over the next couple of years, it’s a major programme of multiple projects, all which interact. At the end of it though we have a building fit for purposes following the plans currently set. I’m sure those plans will adjust a little, but the end date is January 2025, or July, or something - I’m sure the date will slip.

You can’t build a £20m facility with a series of sprints.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#133

Post by fnordpiglet »

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.

Most companies don’t understand what a product manager does, and they are busy eliminating project management roles in favor of an “agile” workflow, so they just repurpose the project managers to be product managers because it’s only two letters different. With predictable results.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#134

Post by chrisoverzero »

jsdwarf wrote: post #131

Boah... fallacies everywhere in this piece. Let's start: > Picasso, Jeff Bezos, Mozart, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Thiel, Leonardo [... would be amazing PMs] I beg to differ. Mozart died at 35, completely indebted after years of excess drinking. Jobs ousted from his own company after poor strategic decisions and intolerable behaviour. Picasso / Leonardo were geniuses of their own w…

> Great discoveries are made by employing great discipline over a long time, not by hiring some rock stars. Why else would Elon Musk call one of his most ambitious ventures "the boring company"?

Because it’s a company that makes tunnels. They bore holes in rock. It’s a company that bores – a boring company. It’s nothing more than a stupid pun.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#135

Post by aeternum »

snapetom wrote: post #128
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 th…

In my experience, the vast majority of PMs could not describe the difference between TLS 1.3 and 1.x.

The problems you describe are legit but unless you have extremely technical product managers, hiring more PMs will only make the problem worse.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#136

Post by sarchertech »

I think that we should change the name from Product Manager to Customer Advocate because that’s what the good PMs I’ve worked with are be up doing.

Product manager is such a weird term that can mean absolutely anything, and putting manager in the title leads to the expectation that PMs are supposed to be running the show instead of working cooperatively. The Customer advocate should be just one voice among many when making decisions.

And after nearly 20 years of building software, I have come to the conclusion that it is completely impossible to be an expert in generic “Product”.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#137

Post by moandcompany »

Spooky23 wrote: post #79
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…

> 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.

I'd argue that the position taken above weakens the engineering practice. Understanding requirements (e.g. constraints) is a core element of engineering, engineering management, and general management. Part of the problem plaguing the tech industry is the "dumping" of this responsibility, and others such as "project management" into some other role. What some like to call a "specialization" may also be called an abdication of responsibilities and ultimately accountability.

In my opinion, the essence of engineering is the methodical art and practice of solving problems. A fundamental part of engineering is understanding the problem(s) to be solved, the constraints, as well as the trade space and trade offs of solutions for those problems.

Not all aspects of (engineering) problems are "technical" in nature, and a failure to understand this and cultivate this understanding weakens the engineering practice.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#138

Post by AlotOfReading »

granshaw wrote: post #121
AlotOfReading wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The engineering classes I took were full of stories and problems centered around solving erroneous customer reports. A good example is the ice cream story [0], where a customer reports their car malfunctioning when they buy the wrong kind of ice cream, which was used as an introduction to root causing techniques. That specific story is apocryphal and the manufacturer varies, but there's an entire mythology of such stories being used to introduce topics / provide "realistic" problems / do design projects for students.

This sort of stuff is a not-insignificant portion of my job as well, since PMs rarely have the technical skills to know what's feasible as a solution anyway in my experience.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#139

Post by Matthias247 »

snapetom wrote: post #128
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 th…

This certainly sounds like your company is having a gap. But the gap sounds to me more like the lack of technical leadership (a strong lead, principal engineer, etc) than a PM. 10 out of 10 PMs I worked with (and it had been more) wouldn't commend on software architecture and internals and wouldn't prevent the needless complexity and unmaintainability aspects. They can at most point out that feature development and bugfixes are too slow, and then its up to the engineering team to improve on this. But also for 10 out of 10 PMs feature development will always be too slow, since customers are asking for things being done yesterday, so this alone isn't a great indicator that engineering is broken.

APIs using different TLS versions falls into the same category. Unless the TLS version is part of the product (which is the case for e.g. API Gateways, webservers and proxies) PMs will likely not care. They should however care about the difference between no TLS at all and a "somewhat modern TLS", because "no security" is definitely an important gap in the product.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#140

Post by liquidpele »

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.

I’ve never met a PM that did any of that either ;)

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