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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#271

Post by carl_sandland »

Can great, quality software come out of a group of 'mediocre' people? I think you'll find that you do indeed need a strong(er) process and set of rules to follow, that's fine but not always applicable.

I think you need to tailor each group and their process carefully, depending on available talent pools and the complexity of the work being attempted, and sometimes you will need active management of requirements to achieve better outcomes. If your process grows faster than the core coding team does, you probably do have a negative process jerk happening you need to disrupt.

Maybe you'll get better results by not calling people 'mediocre' to start with, as if that's anything but a hateful subjective label.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#273

Post by overgard »

I think this phenomena is less about PMs and more about a "data driven" culture.

I worked at a mobile game development company for a couple years. While the industry was young, they had some really big hits and grew to be mid sized. While I wasn't there for that era, talking to the people that were, it was mostly driven by passion and people that cared about games, and while they monetized well it wasn't the focus.

However, they had a couple of misses after those hits. This is pretty normal in game development, although in my opinion those misses were mostly about being too ambitious: way too much tech requiring cutting edge phones, tools that were still not mature, team sizes that were larger than they knew how to handle, etc.

So, the founders stepped down, and they were replaced with a new C-level staff that came from the gambling industry, mainly slot machines.

These people LOVED the numbers, KPIs and all that jazz. They loved showing those numbers to the staff too, which credit for being transparent but realistically a group of creatives are not generally that interested.

The problem was, since every decision required "data", innovation became impossible. Have a cool idea out of left field nobodies done but everyone is excited about? Can't be done, where's the data? But we can make a match 3 with a familiar IP! Who cares that we're just copying the market leaders and entering the space once its already saturated.

Anyway, the company folded two or so years after that. It was a shame because there was a ton of talent there, but the C level management just did not understand the industry, how to get creatives excited, and they did not care about games. They just had "data"

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#274

Post by haolez »

I've seen two types of PMs:

- micromanagers of tasks and features

- insightful data munchers

The first group is usually a bunch of people citing Marty Cagan, talking about continuous discovery and running in circles. They are not helpful and sometimes hurtful to performance.

The second group captures business and market data, process it and create insights from it. They keep the engineering effort focused. Those are very helpful.

This is just my personal experience, of course, but I'm yet to see a third type.

EDIT: to be fair, Marty's books seem to advocate for the second type.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#275

Post by lazystar »

kaibee wrote: post #254
alonsonic wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A product manager is expected to view things from a business point of view. To identify features for the product and help it succeed in the market. A project manager is in charge of planing, execution and governance of a project. They don’t define any of the goals or vision. Saying product is a large project is a big over simplification. If we go that route anything could be called a “large project”.

> in charge of planing, execution and governance of a project. They don’t define any of the goals or vision. This sounds like if you were trying to hire a race-car driver instead hired two people, and put one of them in charge of steering to the left and the other in charge of steering to the right.

this is exactly why back-to-office initiatives have value - it's easier to coordinate when the steerers are next to each other

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#276

Post by FireBeyond »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #227
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…

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…

> 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.

There's a large number of companies where the company is the one wedging the PMs there.

My view is that a PMs job should include (but not be limited to) diplomacy, negotiation and facilitation. But if your heart isn't in that (and it can be easy to become disheartened), then it easily becomes "politics", and the worst parts of politics, at that.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#277

Post by jvvw »

I think the model that the film industry has where films have a director and producer is an interesting one, and one that might be interesting to see followed more in software. The 'vision' for a product is a different skillset from the more logistic skills that are also needed to make good software.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#278

Post by foota »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #227
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…

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…

I wonder if part of the gap here is about whether a company is B2B or B2C. In my experience at a largely B2B company, the product managers are people that aren't necessarily technical, but have experience in the relevant domain and meet with customers to find out what they need and coordinate launches etc., with them.

I don't know if the same role makes as much sense at a B2C company, so maybe people are B2Bs see their value and people at B2C companies don't as much?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#279

Post by Terr_ »

namdnay wrote: post #200
starky wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This adds to the confusion since Project Management Professional is a certification for a Project Manager that specifically uses that acronym and not all project managers have the certification.

I think it was a joke

Alas, the joke is "Too Real" and on all of us.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#280

Post by alexchantavy »

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 feel like that list of responsibilities describes a staff engineer too
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