191–200 of 370 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People using "PM" is adding to the confusion.
That’s why I use PMP for Product Management Professional. Much clearer
Principal Product Manager here. I agree... Way too many people took advantage of this role over the last 20 years, IMO, in the name of FOMO. Too many I avoided or fired because they just could never, never, understand the tech. 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 need…
edit: "nothing" meaning they just schedule meetings
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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…
Principal Product Manager here. I agree... Way too many people took advantage of this role over the last 20 years, IMO, in the name of FOMO. Too many I avoided or fired because they just could never, never, understand the tech. 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 need…
Agree PMs should be technically capable. It's an increasingly frustrating issue on my current team: the PM does nothing and is routinely caught between technical contributors and stakeholders above. I now think engineer/s should just take over the PM role. edit: "nothing" meaning they just schedule meetings
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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.
Does the vast majority of PMs need to tell the difference between TLS 1.3 and 1.x?
I mean, is that a relevant aspect of the vast majority of products?
If not, why should a PM bother about irrelevant details?
One of the cardinal sins of proponents of this "engineers should rule everything" mentality is failing to tell apart the critical factors from the irrelevant details, and conflate not caring about obscure implementation details with incompetence. Except the cheekiest little fallacy in software development circles is that the purpose of all software projects is not correctness or code coverage or uptime or resilience. The purpose of each and every single software project is to serve their users' interests. That's the critical part of a project, and the thing that PMs focus on for the right reasons. Naturally, PMs prioritize work with the biggest impact. Does TLS trivia fit this requirement? No.
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 a…
> 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…
That a Product Manager may seem "in charge," of development is incidental to the role, and not the purpose of it. The role exists to discover features and scale them to customer demand. Managing means "to extract value from," and a lot falls into place when that lands.
I really struggle with this sentiment because I often agree with it, specifically at large companies. At Google product managers became the worst aspect of the entire company. They spent their time arbitraging credit, cutting off communications between builders and executives, and generally appearing for a while, not taking ownership, then leaving after they fucked up the roadmap so badly they couldn’t fix it. They b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why I use PMP for Product Management Professional. Much clearer
This adds to the confusion since Project Management Professional is a certification for a Project Manager that specifically uses that acronym and not all project managers have the certification.