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The product manager role is a mistake
161–170 of 370 posts
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, the Empire State Building was famously built as a series of sprints...
You need a formal design. This doesn't mean you need a formal project. Some amount of planning ahead very obviously helps, but how much is debatable, and when you have people whose sole specialization is "planning ahead", you are certainly past the point where it's too much.
Anyway, the most valuable people are the ones "planning behind", looking for what was left broken and could be done better from now on. Project management defines those people out of existence.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#163> 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 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 changes between companies. At my company the Product Owner is the one who maintains the relationship with customers. Product Managers are there for prioritizing the feature requests. We also have Project Managers for inter-project dependency tracking and Engineering Managers for resource allocation and work output.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#164Earlier 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…
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.
I do believe that the traditional PM role/background should be considered obsolete, especially in software companies. Well-rounded engineers should be in these roles these days.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#165Earlier 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…
It does, but it's still not something engineers do well.
Imagine developing an AAA game with no one in charge of the overall product. Or creating a movie without a producer or a director, expecting the talent to somehow organise itself.
PM isn't an engineering job, it's a vision job - one that needs enough technical knowledge to create a vision that's grounded in reality, while also appealing to customers, while also being able to sell it up and down the org.
That skillset is incredibly rare.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#166> 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…
yeah +1, I used to wear the product manager hat in an engineering role, while working with bad product managers, and so I thought the role was a grift at best. Also dealing with a herd of b2b clients sucked while trying to focus on doing the things we argued about / committed to doing. Then a good PM got hired, he actually understands what's going on / makes the effort to learn, and the life of "Engineering" roles got so much better. It may be significant in this case that product works with engineering in a kind of liason role and doesn't "dictate" much.
Now program managers, it remains to be seen where their value comes from and I hope it does
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#167Earlier 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…
Good engineers work to deeply understand the problem given to them. They understand the different possible solutions, and implement the best one they can, given their constraints.
Good product managers identify the problems to be solved, and prioritize which ones should be solved first.
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s why I use PMP for Product Management Professional. Much clearer
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I do believe that the traditional PM role/background should be considered obsolete, especially in software companies. Well-rounded engineers should be in these roles these days.
Are there enough of them?
Re: The product manager role is a mistake
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
Doesn’t preclude the ability, no, but there are only so many hours in the day.
Writing good code is a very separate skill set from that kind of problem-space work, and software engineers are mostly hired for the former.