The product manager role is a mistake

There is IMO no correlation between being mediocre and being put off by intensity and passion.

Overall I think this article generalizes a lot. I can't say for sure that the article is not applicable to a certain part of the industry, but it certainly doesn't in any way represent my experience.

PMs can be good, bad, or anything inbetween. I've never experienced that a good PM was not a benefit to a project.

I agree, but I am also hesitant to advocate for controls in the form of certification (degrees, licenses, etc) because it just adds a layer that provides a strong positive signal for a while until it’s just inundated by grifters yet again, so now we’re back to square one.

We see this take the form of degree mills and accelerated trade schools initially, which ends up creating more problems, more barriers, and ceases to benefit the companies looking to hire. Everything can and will be gamified, and I am also hesitant to tie people to former employers so heavily as that creates an unhealthy power imbalance.

Then how can we control for talent? I don’t know the answer to this question or if it’s even the right question to ask, but I’m fairly confident that we cannot solve this using 20th century nor modern hiring and screening processes.

The simplest thing I can boil it down to is how they respond when asked a question. With the exceptional PM, when you asked a question you got an answer.

With bad PMs, you ask a question and you get "Good callout! I'll try to get some alignment with our stakeholders on that". Every decision point spins out into this web of stakeholders and cross-functional team buy-in. And no decision is ever made, everything is always in flux and uncertain. During this process they have produced an entire literature of documentation, each version contradictory to the others. "That feature was only in the original doc, we got rid of it in v2" but also "That feature was in v1, I forgot to copy paste it into v2 but we never canceled it. Sorry!" Every variation of every feature exists somewhere, a kind of superposition of the product out there somewhere.

It consistently amazes me that they never seem to be able to grasp how self-destructive this is to the product development. Or maybe they do, but they just don't care and they are just exploiting their evaluation framework. Probably the latter.

I wont hire a PM now that isn't also a contributor during work or in their spare time. Not only should they be excellent leads, they should be able to get down and dirty actually move the needle, design something, write code. Run their own damn prototype and test.

A big part of my current role is just empowering more Jr PMs to contribute more by educating them on certain skills, but it doesn't scale and none of them have the drive to study the subjects on their own.

I envision a shift coming. Ive never subscribed to the bullshit, but Im personally moving away from much of the "PM activities" and spending more time on my original skills, design and engineering...

Project Managers can also be very useful in a complex project that spans departments but that’s a completely separate role