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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#221

Post by breadwinner »

esafak wrote: post #196
breadwinner wrote: post #158

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…

So who's going to do the thing you were hiring for?

Take the example of hiring developers. If the guy you hired turned out to be not so good at coding but is good at DevOps then have him offload DevOps work from other developers. This leaves other developers with more time for development. There's your answer.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#222

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

Matthias247 wrote: post #139
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…

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…

I think that most "good" engineering managers share the same traits as good Product Managers.

- Someone to understand the customer's desires and shut down unnecessary work.

- Drive the team to deliver features that the customers/business actually needs.

- drive tech decisions to prevent future inoperability with other products

- roadshow and maintain a team's reputation across the org

- etc

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#223

Post by xorcist »

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…

That was well put. Imagine that. Still we train our product managers to follow checklists, write endless documents about personas, have discussions about methodology and such things only loosely connected to the work that goes into making the actual product.

Imagine if a director was a bureaucrat. One who followed checklists and made policy documents, and did not have the slightest clue about the actual craft of setting lights, working the camera, and acting.

What's our profession's equivalent of a film director? One with deep knowledge about data structures, who cared about getting it right, together with professionals?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#224

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

allsunny wrote: post #43

Confusing article. “We should get rid of the PM role” but also “We still need people dedicated to do PM things… but don’t call them PMs, they’re just everyday great people.” I feel like the author had a bad experience working with a PM (the MBA comment is telling) and now wants to throw the baby out with the bath water. Business scale creates + requires role specialization. Sure, there are shitty PMs, and it’s a hard…

Yeah, and then they go on to say that all of the great sages weren't PM's, just great people.

I disagree. All of those greats that were mentioned succeeded because they kept the customer and the product tantamount to all else. So really they were just fantastic PM's.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#225

Post by aeternum »

rewmie wrote: post #195
aeternum wrote: post #135

Earlier 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.

> In my experience, the vast majority of PMs could not describe the difference between TLS 1.3 and 1.x. 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 te…

Generally it is quite important especially for SaaS. Old TLS will cause SOC2 cert, PCI cert failures and similar. It is the kind of thing that can derail a major deal as often the 'whale' clients are the ones that really care about security certs while smaller companies and startups don't.

Non-technical PMs tend to gloss over things like that as an engineering-driven feature. Clients don't ask for TLS 1.3 (at least until it's often too late) because they generally aren't considering TLS trivia until it comes time for their next audit.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#226

Post by JCharante »

almostnormal wrote: post #149
tcmb wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A project has a planned end date, a product typically doesn't.

Most modern products seem to have planned end dates.

Development phase is the project. Maintenance phase before sunsetting is I guess another project.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#227

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

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…

My experience with product managers is that they wedge themselves between the business and the technical teams and then wield political power while doing very little.

I'm currently trying desperately to get two different PM's to talk to each other so we can be consistent with permissions sets across two different projects. Both projects use the same set of API's.

One of the PM's is basically incognito, the other has actively been trying to avoid doing any of the work.

But the technical teams will get blamed for this, I know because I've watched these same PM's blame the technical teams for their own failings on other projects.

I'm with the article, fuck Product Managers, grab a senior developer and let him or her spend part of their time interfacing with business while also teaching the younger developers the skills necessary to do it.

The problem isn't that their responsibilities aren't useful, it's that there shouldn't be a role dedicated to their responsibilities, it immediately draws moats around everything and suddenly the need for communication and collaboration jumps through the roof because the people in that role don't understand the technology the way a senior developer would.

There's a segment of the developer population that wants to put their head in the sand, do their job, and clock out. These developers are low value and will never be able to take on the role described above.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#229

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

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…

> Now program managers, it remains to be seen where their value comes from and I hope it does

in my experience, they manage project managers for systems with a high degree of complexity, e.g. an aircraft, and the product managers work through them, instead of through project managers directly. Or they are themselves the product manager, just with different terminology depending on the industry

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#230

Post by ako »

ryanSrich wrote: post #206
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s about responsibility, the PM is responsible for the success of a product. To achieve this he collaborates with all the parties you mention, but in the end the PM has the responsibility. Key in this is bringing together knowledge of the market, the competitors, the customer problems, the value of a solution to these customers, determining a roadmap that will lead towards a successful product, coordinate launch, service, support, and continuous monitoring of the state of the product (does it have the right features, what is the competition doing, what does sales need to effectively sell the product, etc).

Reforge provides good training for product managers. This article provides a good overview of a role of a PM: https://www.reforge.com/previews/product/what-does-a-product...

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