The product manager role is a mistake • Hacker News Board

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#211

Post by swells34 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

snapetom wrote: post #128

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…

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…

Most the problems described here are just bad software engineering. Never seen a PM with any oversight on which DB is used, how shiny the tech is, how the API works, any of that. It definitely seems like there's a lack of coherence and customer focus, which would be in the PM's wheelhouse to deal with, but that's it. Need a better lead engineer with the time and authority to implement good practices.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#212

Post by scrumper » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

cmuguythrow wrote: post #39

scrumper wrote: post #5

It's a fairly harsh take, as a whole, but there's parts of this that absolutely ring true. Once you get that "product org" in a company, it tends to progress the way the author describes, with committees and OKRs and review cycles and planning and a lot of bureaucracy. I took, naively, a product manager job at one place I worked, thinking it would finally give me formal control over the product that I'd been previous…

Just to offer you another perspective: In all of the (B2C) companies in which I have worked as a PM (three, across two different industries), I have been closely involved in shaping and controlling the evolution of the product. My normal month has always consisted of creating anywhere from four to twelve unique proposals (PRDs) for new features for the company to build, with the number created varying based on the si…

My experience was B2B. I was certainly expecting a lot more of the problem identification and solution generation work that you described.

The difficulty was that the owners at the top had unshakeable ideas about what the product should be. That's ok, single minded vision can be good and all that. In my very hands-on sales engineering role I'd make things that my prospects were asking for, put them in the product, they'd buy it, and my prototypes and hacks and tools would end up getting refined, hardened, and supported by the implementation team. It worked well because everything I did had big dollars attached to it (so the org itself didn't mind) and the product advanced in a way that the market wanted.

The problems arose when we put in the product management process - the whole committee/requirement/signoff thing the article describes and I mentioned in my earlier comment. That created a formal bureaucratic mechanism for various players to stop all the ideas I had. Before, they'd be fait accomplis necessary for winning a big deal. Now they were just ideas divorced from value from some guy who should've known his place. Back then I was hopeless at understanding how to get a group of people with different agendas to agree on something (I think it's called 'politics').

> if you were simply ordering an existing backlog, who was defining the new items to add to the backlog?

It's over 15 years ago but what I remember is that there were thousands of semi-structured documents which represented things that, with the new product org, got turned into backlog items (stories, epics). This was part of an attempt to move engineering to a more agile way of working while creating a product function to support it. So it's more that we didn't have a backlog as such, then we stood it up and triaged everything we already had into it. All this was happening while the company was trying to learn about agile. I remember day long meetings where we all tried to argue about whether technical tasks belonged on a backlog, and if not how you could write a user story for remediating a piece of technical debt. Basic stuff but none of us had a clue.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#213

Post by esafak » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:43 PM UTC

glimshe wrote: post #71

justinpombrio wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sounds like you had a project manager, not a product manager. A good product manager is very valuable.

Project management was the role Larry Page once axed in 2001: https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#214

Post by namdnay » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:43 PM UTC

angarg12 wrote: post #28

Currently I work for a big tech company that mostly doesn't employ PM roles, so I can give a first hand take on this. My feelings so far are mixed. I've worked in PM-heavy organizations before and I agree that those suck. But at the end of the day there is some work that a PM would do that still needs to be done. In my org that responsibility officially falls into Software Managers and Senior+ Developers. For example…

To give another perspective:

> Not only you need to deliver your own work as an IC, but you need to coordinate other people and ensure that things get done.

That for me is the definition of a senior/lead engineer

> Not only this is extra work, but let's be honest, many developers don't have the skills to be effective PMs.

To be fair, Many PMs don’t have the skills to be effective PMs

> It also makes inter-team collaboration difficult, since now you have to coordinate people that don't share a reporting structure with you.

As is the case for a PM

I think our core disagreement comes around “is it worth spinning off this part of the job to a dedicated role”. I happen to believe that’s nearly never true for engineers

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#215

Post by pseudalopex » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #165

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…

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…

Separating product from engineering, engineering management, and general management does not mean 1 person is in charge. Integrating them does not mean no one is.

The article was all about the consequences of the skill set being incredibly rare.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#216

Post by mikea1 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:45 PM UTC

willsmith72 wrote: post #2

What a weird article. A whole lot of words to say, "hiring low performers will hurt your company"? And the alternative is, "hire good people but not with the PM role"? It reads like someone had a bad experience with a PM who thought they were Steve Jobs. PMs are just ordinary people, I don't understand this supposition that anyone holding the title is going be an entitled douchbag. An org can have thousands of PMs, e…

> It reads like someone had a bad experience with a PM who thought they were Steve Jobs.

I had the opposite understanding about the article. Steve Jobs was an extraordinary leader who through immense will power created good products; an attempt to replace someone like Jobs as the product manager with an ordinary person will result in a mediocre product.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#217

Post by lostdog » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #166

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…

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 go…

Yeah, the problem is that accountability for PMs is usually missing. No one checks whether the PM is adding or removing effectiveness, so the good PMs go unrecognized and the bad ones keep siphoning energy from the project.

Second, bad PMs just create unnecessary work for everyone around them. Everyone believes they just have to do what the PM says, and then suddenly you have a whole eng team contributing nothing.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#218

Post by Spooky23 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:53 PM UTC

shostack wrote: post #88

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…

I really hope you're not implying that project managers are or need to be less smart than product managers. They are different disciplines, and like any profession there's likely more people who are not good at it than people that are. But I've worked with great visionary product people and excellent project and program managers (and strive to be one every day myself). Neither could do the other's job well or effecti…

I wasn’t writing a treatise on every occupation and was being a little jocular.

What I’ve witnessed over a 20 year career is that weak product people devolve to mediocre project managers. It’s easier to be a shitty project manager.

Good project managers are gold. I worked with one who stood out a decade ago - his leadership at execution was such that a $350M, 20 month implementation, with collaboration with construction, tech, and external suppliers completed 45 minutes ahead of the original schedule. He’s since retired and passed away, but an inspirational leader I was privileged to get to know. Ponder that - how many project managers are acknowledged as leaders?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#219

Post by bruce511 » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

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…

There are certainly more bad managers than good ones. (Just like programmers.)

So it follows there will be more anecdotes about bad managers than good ones.

With respect, if you've never had a good, or great, manager then I understand it'll be hard to envision a good one.

I say this not to invalidate your anecdote but yo say that managers, like programmers, are not created equal and they cannot just be swapped like burgers at macdonalds.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#220

Post by swalling » Sun, Oct 29, 2023, 7:56 PM UTC

Some engineers and designers simply cannot stomach the idea that they aren’t actually geniuses. This guy comparing great visionary engineers to Picasso immediately sounds like one of those people that pretty much anyone (in any role) hates working with due to their massive ego.

There are many many bad PMs who are either dead weight or actively drag down their teams. But most eng and design teams are so much more inept and slow without any PM that even a mediocre one clearly improves velocity (if not effectiveness).