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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#301

Post by yCombLinks »

saulpw wrote: post #238
xorcist wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sett…

> What's our profession's equivalent of a film director? Scrum master.

Hardly. Scrum master is more like a production assistant. Make sure everyone knows when and where they are supposed to be. Communicate any issues with the plan

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#302

Post by grvdrm »

rsynnott wrote: post #66
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…

An extremely common organisational leadership failure mode is “[role/thing] is useless, get rid of it… Ooops, we actually needed that. Bring it back, but call it something else so that we don’t have to admit our mistake.” The author has, apparently, decided to skip the intermediate step and just rename things for no reason.

Also, bring it back but don’t call it that and maybe we can get by paying someone less to do the same work.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#303

Post by Nathanba »

rogerclark wrote: post #237

At Apple, we had Project Managers (for instance "Engineering Project Managers" or EPMs). These PMs were not our bosses, and functioned as our peers in the organizations. They had a well-defined role: to facilitate the project being completed and to manage the dependencies with other teams and projects. Apple PMs do this through a combination of meetings, Radar (issue tracking), and interfacing with ICs and their mana…

but that's how it's officially supposed to be in other companies as well and it never works out that way. The PM sits at the middle of customers, leadership and implementation and the leadership then continually talks to the PMs and tells them what they want and the PM relays it and so inevitably the PM becomes a sort of artificial authority figure even though it is supposed to be a flat hierarchy. And of course a professional, informal relationship develops between PM and leadership because they talk all the time and so if you ever dared to ask leadership directly for whether this is really what they want, they'll back up the PM.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#304

Post by snapetom »

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…

> If not, why should a PM bother about irrelevant details?

Because engineering failed to consider these details. Now I'm the one that has to point out how amateur we look when in some areas we don't require TLS and others we're so strict, we only have 1.3. Engineers (management or rank and file) who can't understand why this is a problem is exactly the reason you need technical PMs.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#305

Post by snapetom »

simmerup wrote: post #197
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…

How does a company not make any money for 20 years that sounds insane

cost center

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#306

Post by Nathanba »

overgard wrote: post #273

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. H…

yes one of the most frustrating things is to deal with people who come in and ask for data to support an idea. You suddenly have to justify common sense and good ideas to people who don't have any data for their ideas either but they'll certainly push their ideas first before any data has landed. After all you have to develop something, you can't just do nothing. And then later you do a survey on what they ended up doing without any data and naturally the thing that was visible got selected. People very rarely look at something and say: "well this entire product you developed is just garbage." Take the netflix ui for example, I'm sure they did plenty of surveys. Or the Google+ ui or the Windows Metro Phone. And yet it's not human to expect the surveyed to say that this is all bad and redesign it all from the ground up. A human being when asked for specifics will give specifics of some kind and then they will fix those specifics and think that it's all better now. I mean it's all absurd. Knowing what feature or design to implement is not really easy to do based on data. By the time you can gather data you already had to implement designs, ideas etc to a quite advanced degree. Data is very useful but it certainly can't be used for new product or feature development until you already developed them. At which point the data is already old and you have to make decisions about the future again.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#307

Post by Justsignedup »

Nathanba wrote: post #290
Justsignedup wrote: post #61

The thing about PMs. They fulfill a very specific need, and that need is hard to quantify, but I can tell you that without a good PM everything falls apart. Here's a list of what they tend to do: - gather information from users on what is/isn't working for them - gather information from executives about what needs to be done to keep the company working - gather information from industry leaders who may or may not be…

> gather information from users on what is/isn't working for them trivial and part of analytics and bug reporting that anyone can have a look at and it's the same job that the QA team does too which you are in contact with as a programmer anyway > gather information from executives about what needs to be done to keep the company working the boss tells you what to implement whether there is a PM in the middle or not >…

rofl, look at everything you commented on. You're basically making my point. Also it sounds like you never worked with a programmer before, because "that's literally the job of programmers, to figure out how to implement something" is by far vastly underestimating how good programmers are when you give them fuzzy information. Maybe by year 7 or 8 they can get fuzzy info and work that into a well functioning piece. Before then they either will complain "why can't someone just tell me what to build and I'll build it" or they never push back on "do we need to build this? And as such?" and by god try to get them to estimate. Oh wait and try to get those estimates to be less than 300% off.

Just saying, you are over trivializing everything which in my mind leads me to think you haven't lead an engineering team or maybe oversaw one or two junior or mid level engineers.

A good PM should _not_ be advocating for the engineers to do whatever. If they are doing this I would be the first in line to recommend either re-adjusting their priorities and having a senior pm oversee them, or kick them out. A good PM is what creates the space for engineers to do their job, and a bad one will not wrangle the chaos into an executable situation.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#308

Post by Justsignedup »

doktrin wrote: post #86
Justsignedup wrote: post #61

The thing about PMs. They fulfill a very specific need, and that need is hard to quantify, but I can tell you that without a good PM everything falls apart. Here's a list of what they tend to do: - gather information from users on what is/isn't working for them - gather information from executives about what needs to be done to keep the company working - gather information from industry leaders who may or may not be…

In recent experience the PMs I have worked with have primarily concerned themselves with the desires of executives. Literally all the other responsibilities you mentioned were handled by others.

Yes, and this is exactly when you have ineffective PMs, and senior leadership isn't paying attention.

With a good product and design team, I have been part of engineering teams that have 5 engineers than can do the work of 20, without working overtime, consistently deliver, and rarely, have to implement anything twice.

The difference between effective product and not is absolutely night and day. The best analogy is driving a modern car, vs driving a modern car without vehicle stability, anti-skid, power steering, automatic transmission, or AC. Sure you absolutely can drive it, but after a while you will need way more breaks than those who have all the nice features, and won't roll over in bad situations.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#309

Post by Nathanba »

Justsignedup wrote: post #307
Nathanba wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gather information from users on what is/isn't working for them trivial and part of analytics and bug reporting that anyone can have a look at and it's the same job that the QA team does too which you are in contact with as a programmer anyway > gather information from executives about what needs to be done to keep the company working the boss tells you what to implement whether there is a PM in the middle or not >…

rofl, look at everything you commented on. You're basically making my point. Also it sounds like you never worked with a programmer before, because "that's literally the job of programmers, to figure out how to implement something" is by far vastly underestimating how good programmers are when you give them fuzzy information. Maybe by year 7 or 8 they can get fuzzy info and work that into a well functioning piece. Be…

You are talking from a fixed, assembly line perspective of having to deliver fixed value at fixed intervals. This is just not how I think of myself - as a cog in a machine. If you have to think of people this way because this is the only way your job functions in a huge corporation then do it but the ideal world doesn't work that way and therefore I don't want to work that way. I'm never going to be happy in a job where a PM isn't enabling me to do whatever I think is right for the product. Because just like you I happen to think that my ideas are good, so it would be a waste to just sit in a job like a soulless cog and work off an issue list every week with zero thought or input. Expecting people to be like this is probably why you get people like this.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#310

Post by tsunamifury »

esafak wrote: post #199
tsunamifury wrote: post #62

I really struggle with this sentiment because I often agree with it, specifically at large companies. At Google product managers became the worst aspect of the entire company. They spent their time arbitraging credit, cutting off communications between builders and executives, and generally appearing for a while, not taking ownership, then leaving after they fucked up the roadmap so badly they couldn’t fix it. They b…

Your company is too small to attract power seekers, and you can easily filter them out at hiring.

You’re right. It only attracts people who are excited for the work not arbitrage power.
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