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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#151

Post by s-mon »

I read: 'I had a bad experience with a product manager, so all are bad.'

I agree that there are tons of bad PMs out there. But allow me to summarize what a good PM does:

Talk to customers; either to dig deep into their use case, deescalate a situation, figure out solutions, or conduct research. Monitor the rest of the market. Plan launches, pricing, and coordinate with sales teams, etc. - I had Product Marketing staff before, but they missed context and delivered bad experiences. I find it way harder to find a good product marketing manager than a good product manager. The PM is the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) and therefore takes a lot of shit. The PM acts as a filter so you can continue doing your job. A good PM can even write a line of code here and there. Prototyping is part of the job. Roadmap, strategy, vision, build vs. buy... often the center of friction between what the business wants, what customers want, what the business can afford, and what engineers want to build. Finding a middle ground. You are right; these are not skills you learn in school. A PM wears a lot of hats. People with a solution architect or engineering background with a customer-facing element to their past tend to have the best chance of being a good PM. But by no means is the PM job an unnecessary one - do you want to figure out how to price a product and be responsible if sales can't sell it? I hope you come across a good PM in your career.

'Just hire great people' - what's new?

PS: The success of a PM highly depends on the engineering culture. If engineers are convinced all PMs are useless and they have no real job, or as a real-life example: engineer thinks A, PM shows data that shows B, but engineer just thinks the data is wrong and will do A anyway... it will be a highly frustrating collaboration for both. Please keep an open mind.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#152

Post by sarchertech »

melevittfl wrote: post #99
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.

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 pr…

>Customers are rarely able to express their underlying issue. They usually communicate what they think the solution is.

In my experience the vast majority of PMs do exactly this. Half of my job since I became a staff+ engineer almost a decade ago is taking “solutions” from product managers and trying to figure out what they really want.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#153

Post by esafak »

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?

Project managers co-ordinate the teams and stakeholders associated with a project. It only applies to bigger companies. In smaller projects senior engineers and engineering managers do the same job.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#155

Post by kcplate »

moandcompany wrote: post #137
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…

> 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 positi…

> 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.

Determination, evaluation, and articulation of requirements is the sweet spot of the product manager role. Understanding those requirements is certainly necessary for an engineer to build to the requirements.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#156

Post by corytheboyd »

Work long enough in one role and every other role starts to feel unnecessary. You start to learn what creates success for you personally, and expanding that will inevitably awkwardly slam you into other people who are now seemingly blocking you. Enter this feeling of “PMs are useless, just let me do it”.

I can guarantee that if you start being responsible for actual PM work for an extended period of time, you will start drafting your article about “they ask us to do too much, we need time to focus”

Working with other humans at scale is inherently difficult, we all take turns being the solution, and we all take turns being the problem. Such is life.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#157

Post by lgkk »

I think Product Managers are extremely valuable.

I believe the author must have worked with PMINO or Product Manager in Name Only. AKA, when companies hire Product Mangers (let's call them PM uppercase) and make them program managers (pm, and please this isn't me demeaning program managers by using lower case- just a differentiation).

A PM is in charge of setting product vision and realizing it. A pm is in charge of ensuring that happens by aligning resources. Both are really valuable parts of the team, but they are different roles. I don't believe it is good to mix the two because they are two distinct set of skills.

The PM is the war strategist who understands opponents' weakness and opportunities to strike for the campaign's success, while the pm is in charge of staging the battlefield to ensure those tactics can be carried out by keeping the battalions equipped for success. I know military analogies aren't everyone's cup of tea, but just using what I know.

The best PMs I've worked with were purely product focused. They didn't engage in resource alignment and dealing with middle managers. The best pms were purely managers. They engaged in working with engineering managers/directors to ensure the right people were working on the right initiatives. They kept schedules on track and helped everyone stay sane with the work that had to be done.

Maybe I am wrong too, but this is what I believe is the right approach that I plan to employ at my company. When the company is small and only a single engineering team (like 5 people total) I don't think there's any reason to have a pm. When there are multiple teams and distinct organizations, you really need pm so the PM can stay focused in their role.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#158

Post by breadwinner »

Here's what I have found, working in a big software company: The company has rigid roles. Often they are not able to find a good fit for the role. Rather than leaving the role unfilled, they hire whoever then can find. The person is not able to fill the role well, and that's when the bad things mentioned in the article happens.

The solution is to not be rigid with the role. Have the person do whatever they are best at doing.

This is not just a PM thing. If you hired a developer and it turns out they are not good at coding but are good at DevOps then let them do DevOps full-time, offloading DevOps responsibilities from other developers.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#159

Post by moandcompany »

kcplate wrote: post #155
moandcompany wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 positi…

> 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. Determination, evaluation, and articulation of requirements is the sweet spot of the product manager role. Understanding those requirements is certainly necessary for an engineer to build to the requirements.

An engineer's understanding of requirements entails determination, evaluation, and articulation of those requirements. Calling oneself an engineer doesn't preclude their ability to do these things, and force them to call themselves a "product manager" for doing so. And quite often, especially at more senior levels, an engineer must do these things.

Once upon a time, this too was a formalized practice in engineering that people called "Systems Engineering":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering

https://www.nasa.gov/reference/2-0-fundamentals-of-systems-e...

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#160

Post by snapetom »

Matthias247 wrote: post #139
snapetom wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

A lack of engineering leadership is certainly true. As is often told, the VP of engineering enjoyed creating PRs more than actually leading. There has never been an architect.

The point is though, product never challenged on approaches, and you’re right. They never came from technical backgrounds. Product managers were promoted from the BA ranks. They never raised technical questions like that - “Is it a bad thing if the customer has to connect this way for this API and another way for another API?” If the idea is that engineering asks those questions, I’d counter with that’s venturing squarely into product’s realm.

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