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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#201

Post by karaterobot »

iamwil wrote: post #171
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…

What made that one PM great? What did they do or what was their philosophy? The outcome was that they got the team to be more productive, but what was the input that differed from the other PMs?

I can't really say. I'll describe some of the things I observed: they had incredibly good people skills with both customers and coworkers, they had the ability to ask incisive questions, and make good decisions with imperfect information, they context switched smoothly, they were well organized, and they made people excited about what they were working on. They also worked longer hours than anyone I know of at the company.

This sounds like a combination of charisma, leadership, and drive, which makes sense as a pretty rare set of qualities for one person to have.

... And reading that, I think I left out that they were super nice, and everybody liked them.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#202

Post by namdnay »

Spooky23 wrote: post #79
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…

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…

> 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.

Why on earth would being able to handle interactions “water down” engineering? They’re two perpendicular skillsets. We’re not in Hollywood, engineers don’t have to be autistic

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#203

Post by Zigurd »

The article approaches the problem in a strange way: In most big consumer-facing companies, product manager is a very important title and product managers have a lot of power.

One problem is that Scrum jargon uses the term "product owner." That might have been intended to give that person more influence, but the effect most often is that real product managers assign junior people to that role and it becomes the "features check-box accountant."

Real product managers should be directly engaged in product development teams because, if they are any good, they have clout with senior management and can grok concepts like minimum viable product, especially the viable part.

I can understand the frustration with mediocre product managers. But that's a symptom of being in a sub-scale organization that can't hire great product managers. If the senior management don't see that and engage better with their product teams to make up for it, you're screwed. And Scrum jargon often adds to the problem.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#204

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#205

Post by karaterobot »

ryanSrich wrote: post #144
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.

> That’s what designers are for.

Designers interview people, and potential features may come out of that. They don't put those potential features into a roadmap and allocate resources to them. I'm a designer: if it were up to me, I'd spend 99% of my time improving the UX of the product we have, because that's what I care about most. Somebody has to own the vision for the product with respect to the company's business goals, and individual designers and engineers are not the right people for that. Maybe I ought to have phrased that better originally.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#206

Post by ryanSrich »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #181
ryanSrich wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This might make sense for a company with one product, but for a larger company with many products, there's a lot of benefit in having one person per product who understands their product deeply, and can put on any of these hats when required to make the product better.

Seems like you’d have a lot of overlap if what the PM is doing are the activities I listed, and you also employ the people I listed.

Also, what engineer doesn’t understand the product deeply from both a technical and business perspective? Maybe a contract dev, or a new hire.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#207

Post by Zigurd »

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…

I take issue with excellent product management being hard to quantify. There is a creative aspect, but one indicator that's easy to examine is whether they understand strategic competitive analysis, not just point-by-point features bingo. Secondly, have they got the stature in the org to communicate about a project to senior management. If they have got both those attributes, you are in good shape.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#208

Post by alwa »

simmerup wrote: post #197
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…

How does a company not make any money for 20 years that sounds insane

I don’t know if it applies to the situation the GP described, but profit != revenue.

It seems to me, especially in the wild and woolly mom-n-pop end of the market, that there might be ample room for a company to sustainably put food on a certain number of employees’ family tables without much left over to characterize as profit.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#209

Post by chiph »

ryanSrich wrote: post #144
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.

A product manager works at a higher level than those roles. They aren't implementers - they collect information, identify needs, create plans, and get approvals. And then direct the roles you mentioned to do the work needed.

A PM will say things like: "I spent 120 hours talking with our users last quarter. They want a macro language added to the product to make their work easier. Our major competitor already has this feature. We have a budget from the executives and 6 months to get it done. We can get the CX person to do some focus groups to figure out how the users expect it to work, the designer to create some interface options for everyone to choose between and then do the UI wireframes, then the leads can work together to plan the coding schedule based on the implementation phases I will give them."

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#210

Post by haizhung »

justinpombrio wrote: post #37
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, 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…

I think that’s the challenging part. A product manager is supposed to stuff holes in your team that no one else currently does. Do you have a strong TL with a good product sense? Then the PM should probably spend their time talking to customers, and not interfere with the engineering team so much.

Do you have a good UX team, but the engineering team is just a bit too big to be comfortable? Then the PM should work with the team to streamline communications and processes.

The hard part about this is that on the one hand, you need a PM that is experienced enough that they can set up processes and be disciplined enough to make sure they are followed. On the other hand, you need a PM that is able to embrace the chaos on aspects of the teams organization where it is beneficial for the team. Oh, and also they should be a domain expert, if possible. Know SQL. Know how to talk to management. Etc.

I think if you have a good one, it is a strong force multiplier for the team. If you have a bad one, it is a force subtractor.

And it is extremely difficult to tell beforehand (or even while they are actually working in that team!) which kind of PM you have. It’s one of those roles that, if it’s done perfectly, people won’t be sure whether you have done anything at all.

But I agree with the premise that there are probably too many bad ones in circulation right now.

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