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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#141

Post by programd »

billyhoffman wrote: post #81

I think most people have an incomplete understanding of what a product manager should do. It's bigger than "project management" or "project management + defining a roadmap + talking to customers." What you are building, why, how you price it, how you speak to the market about it, how you position yourself in your category, how you partner with others to provide a better solution (either services companies to provide…

I would argue that everything you described above falls under the umbrella of business development and should be in the hands of a VP level exec and their staff.

Unfortunately very often I've seen this role handed out to a person who does not have either the qualifications or experience for this role, despite perhaps being adept at the clerical parts of the job (the meetings, the JIRA management, the Power Points, the Agile theatre).

My sense is that product managers are a layer of management which frequently causes disconnects and friction between the executive team, engineering, and ultimately customers. They typically have no power to influence business strategy and frequently no expertise on the complexities of engineering the product. (As always there are exceptions - but few and far between).

I'll even point to a perfect example playing out with Creative Assembly, the studio behind the Total War game franchise. Here's a nice dissection of the situation (complete with insider company leaks) by Bellular News:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDcgpaypkQI

The TLDR is that an excessive focus on a product management driven strategy is hurting the long term viability of a multi-million dollar franchise with a very commited but increasingly dissapointed fan base. Also some good points on the dangers of letting technical debt accumulate and how not to intereact with your customers. There's an MBA case study unfolding here I think.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#142

Post by sarchertech »

sanderjd wrote: post #109
sfteus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Handing the company over to PMs is a very common problem I’ve seen at smaller startups.

It’s generally not that they are above the leadership team, but that that the leadership team have abdicated responsibility for product development to the head of product.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#143

Post by SkyPuncher »

sanderjd wrote: post #109
sfteus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My company is product led. That means PMs have huge influence on what gets built. The how is still left to the engineers.

I think it works pretty well. We ship a lot of great stuff.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#144

Post by ryanSrich »

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

That’s what CX is for.

> interview users to identify potential features

That’s what designers are for.

> manage leadership, play politics for resource allocation

That’s what your lead/people manager is for.

You don’t need a PM. You need an org chart.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#145

Post by kcplate »

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…

Perhaps it was inelegantly put by the original commenter, but I think the gist is that the product managers who lack some of the important product management skills around vision, ability to be customer facing, and effective and articulate communications tend to work more like project managers—effective acting as tactical managers within a product as opposed to strategic ones for the product.

We can define and name the roles all sorts of things (project manager, product owner, product manager, product marketing manager), but what it boils to is for any complex product there is a need for the management of the product at a holistic level and a need for management of a product at a granular level.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#146

Post by liquidpele »

doktrin wrote: post #86
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…

In recent experience the PMs I have worked with have primarily concerned themselves with the desires of executives. Literally all the other responsibilities you mentioned were handled by others.

This… and trying to squeeze dates out of everyone to fill boxes in a document.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#148

Post by vsareto »

samtho wrote: post #103
shapefrog wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

A bigger population just hasn't been trained properly. We have no controls for that, so people get lucky with disparate learning being just enough for their first job, then that turns into experience towards the next job.

Then they find themselves among high performers and can't keep up, really through no fault of their own.

Some high performers are just natural and born with it, which is unfair to let that affect how anyone judges others' performance, but it still happens too (esp. if the high performer is doing the judgment).

What I generally see when people categorize their workers into high/low performance is from a bigger issue of poor stewardship over the industry and training its talent.

This means I don't actually have to improve, I can instead just spam job applications and get lucky just because technology is such a large industry.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#149

Post by almostnormal »

tcmb wrote: post #120
elicksaur wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A project has a planned end date, a product typically doesn't.

Most modern products seem to have planned end dates.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#150

Post by sarchertech »

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

My CS degree was full of classes where we had to deal with problems like that.
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