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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#241

Post by waldothedog »

waldothedog wrote: post #31
remoquete wrote: post #12

More than a dozen years in tech have taught me that roles are simply ways of expressing organizational wishes. You want someone who thinks about something as a product? You open a PM position. You want a team lead? Here's an EM position. Job titles are elements of fiction that allow us to play that RPG called work under different angles. What you ultimately bring to work is your unique mix of talents and experience.…

[emoji reaction: 100%]; [emoji reaction: thanks]

Wow, I guess this was un-funny enough to warrant downvoting.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#242

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

the grift is strong with this one.

well just remember that engineers do this to have portfolio pieces on their resume. they need validation from other people that they worked on a software stack, and to be able to do live interview assignments about that software stack.

this actually just another symptom of a really bad interviewing process where nobody can tell that you're a competent engineer unless you pigeon-hole yourself to one stack that might not always have jobs for it, or for very long. there is also pressure to work on the coolest software stacks, because maybe you will be a scarce resource for a few years and get a major premium in compensation on the fastest growing companies. the other symptom is that companies aren't doing training, they're allergic to it, so they only want engineers that have years of potentially verifiable experience working on the exact stack they have, so that engineer could "hit the ground running" despite needing to keep the job opening up for 6 months to find that person.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#243

Post by trog »

Spooky23 wrote: post #218
shostack wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 construct…

Couldn't agree more. I didn't really get project management until I'd worked with a few good ones.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#244

Post by sarchertech »

solatic wrote: post #110
AlotOfReading wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not a straight up engineering job? A good chunk of "engineer school" is practicing "customer has an issue, design a solution" type problems, in-between all the math.

Good Product people don't just build exactly what the customer described as their problem. They understand that sometimes there's a better way to solve it. In "engineering school", you can't tell your professor "I understand what you're actually trying to achieve, so I built X instead of Y because I think it'll be better for you". Product figures out what to build, and Engineering figures out how.

Sure you can. I’ve literally had classes that worked exactly like that. I had classes where I had to interview and observe actual customers using our product.

What you’re describing is a huge part of engineering. Engineers have been doing this long before Product Managers existed. When I started, software engineers used to just talk directly to customers, domain experts, business analysts, and business leaders.

At “product led companies” the engineers just end up trying to figure out what the product manager actually wants because it’s not really possible in most cases to separate the what from the how.

Having worked with both systems, I don’t think the way it works now is better.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#245

Post by homarp »

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…

>there aren't enough good PMs to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good product manager scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre PMs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones.

there aren't enough good software developers to go around. My belief is the number of people cut out to be a good software developer scales linearly with the size of the population. You need certain personality traits and other qualities that can't be taught. You can mint mediocre SWDevs in school, but you can't make good ones that way, let alone great ones.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#246

Post by ericyd »

I'm not at all convinced of the author's argument. Mediocre people in any level of an organization will produce mediocre results. If that person is in a position of leadership, their mediocrity might reach further. I don't see how anything the author said is specific to a PM role.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#247

Post by nintendo1889 »

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…

So you're saying that the dude fired in 'Office Space' for bringing the specs from customers to engineers was necessary?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#249

Post by yellow_mixer »

robertlagrant wrote: post #176
yellow_mixer wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing sounds like a Technical Product Manager, not a tech lead. The minute you have them “run a team”, you are combining both roles into one.

Nothing I've mentioned is anything to do with product management. The optional "run a team" bit is "team lead". Not product.

Writing a tickets is usually not owned by engineering. Some engineering managers may do this work, but it’s usually owned by Product while Engineering helps refine and turn tickets into actionable work. Engineering also doesn't negotiate features. Engineerings job is to help product determine LOE and help Product prioritize requirements for a future release. Again, strong engineering leads can do this work, but I believe Product Owner should hold these responsibilities.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#250

Post by tbragin »

I'm a product manager, and I'm glad that many commenters in this thread agree that we are not all useless :) Of course, just like with any role, there are those that are good and bad at it, but I am glad most of you worked with good PMs and know the value such a person can bring.

I also saw astute comments from folks that recognize that if the product manager role does not exist as a distinct role, someone else in the organization has to take on the work of determining what to build and when, based on market and customers needs - usually engineering or product marketing. There is nothing wrong with that, btw, just different way to slice the same pie of responsibilities. Finally, several folks rightfully pointed out that a product manager (person accountable for building the right product for the market) is very different from a project or program manager (a person coordinating internal activities).

The only thing I'd add here is that product management roles can also be very different, depending on the stage of the company (early stage vs late stage), the type of product it builds (e.g. B2B vs B2C), and the industry vertical. Looking at the author's LI profile, he seems to work for larger companies, in the financial sector, in the UK. Perhaps in that world (which I perceive to be a fairly rigid, regulated industry), the role of the product manager is quite different from what I have personally experienced working as a PM in the Bay Area for early and mid stage startups.

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