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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#261

Post by sarchertech »

ketzo wrote: post #170
moandcompany wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An engineer's understanding of requirements entails determination, evaluation, and articulation of those requirements. Calling oneself an engineer doesn't preclude their ability to do these things, and force them to call themselves a "product manager" for doing so. And quite often, especially at more senior levels, an engineer must do these things. Once upon a time, this too was a formalized practice in engineering t…

Doesn’t preclude the ability, no, but there are only so many hours in the day. Writing good code is a very separate skill set from that kind of problem-space work, and software engineers are mostly hired for the former.

Once you get to staff+ level, engineers are no longer hired mostly for writing good code.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#262

Post by flappyeagle »

skrebbel wrote: post #27
nlh wrote: post #20

I was ready to hate this article based on the title - I presumed it was a typical "PMs are dumb, all your company needs is smart engineers who rule the world" piece. But it wasn't that, and the author nails the problem pretty much perfectly. But: The author hand-waves the solution into oblivion: "There’s an alternative model that works. You hire everyday great people. Each one needs to be great at something, obsessed…

We do it but we’re 15 people so it doesnt count. Valve seems to do (or at least, have done) something very similar. Their employee handbook[0] used to be a staple on HN but I haven’t seen it flying around much lately. I wonder if it’s working out of them. [0] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...

Valve doesn’t ship

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#263

Post by flappyeagle »

turnsout wrote: post #15

Don't hate the player, hate the game… PMs are just doing exactly what leadership has asked them to do. The real problem is unrealistic roadmaps filled with top-down strategic initiatives which are often made up by leadership with very little rigor—all in the pursuit of growth at any cost. The bad PM is an emergent property of that system.

A good PM pushes back on those initiative and fixes them

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#264

Post by Loughla »

wombatpm wrote: post #168
koonsolo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People using "PM" is adding to the confusion.

That’s why I use PMP for Product Management Professional. Much clearer

For what it's worth, I enjoyed that joke. I work in education and the number of redundant acronyms and initialisms (if that's a word) is astounding.

BIT meeting on my calendar. Is it behavioral intervention team or something about the bachelor of information technology or Business Information technology or bachelor of industrial technology or are we talking about income taxes or what?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#265

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

esafak wrote: post #153
elicksaur wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like whoever named these titles did a poor job. They’re so close, can you blame people for not seeing a difference? What is a product but a large project anyways?

Project managers co-ordinate the teams and stakeholders associated with a project. It only applies to bigger companies. In smaller projects senior engineers and engineering managers do the same job.

There's sometimes also program managers who organize relevant projects across the company (for example with GDPR compliance a program manager might coordinate between legal and various products, identify risks and report progress to C-level, and each product will have a project kick off to get it into compliance (depending on the effort, the person overlooking this project and working with program might be a dedicated project manager, engineering manager, some engineer etc).

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#266

Post by jokethrowaway »

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 happens is that the things a PM does do not get done. 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. So it doesn't get done.

That's not what a PM does. You're missing leaders.

Customer relations is generally under sales. Resource allocations, politics, that's engineering leadership stuff.

Customer interviews is part of what a PM (or UXer) does. It's never been a critical pain point in any business I've been though. It's part of defining the product, oftentimes companies have a X years backlog of features users asked for and not enough time to build.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#267

Post by sarchertech »

ako wrote: post #230
ryanSrich wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, s…

Having one product owner is fine. The problem is that it should be a role someone moves into from one of the disciplines involved. Design, engineering, domain expert etc…

Now we have Product Manager orgs with Associate PMs, junior PMs, senior PMs, group PMs etc…

A junior PM almost by definition can’t be a product owner. They don’t have the seniority to make decisions, so what you end up with is a situation where senior PMs are handing down solutions to junior PMs who are coming up with even more detailed solutions to engineers. I’ve seen it time and again.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#268

Post by ChicagoDave »

There are certainly issues with having product managers, but the op doesn’t even seem to understand what they do.

I usually see PMs get soft authority, but not a budget.

However, I’ve worked with excellent product managers that can break down features and work through modeling sessions with strong understanding of what the business needs and what stakeholders expect.

It’s a silly article from an inexperienced person.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#269

Post by strangattractor »

I know of several companies over the years started by former Product Managers for teams I have worked for in the past. For the most part they were very successful and were the CEOs of their startups. Percentage wise they were more successful than my peer engineers at the time.

Most of them worked on failed projects within a much larger company. The failure was due more to bad management of large Corp rather than them. One is a VP at Apple today. Gotta say my career hasn't really shot to the moon by staying in Engineering. Food for thought.

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