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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#311

Post by orand »

haolez wrote: post #274

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…

There you go. I was about to call you out for associating Marty's name with the first type, but then I saw your edit. :-)

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#312

Post by haolez »

orand wrote: post #311
haolez wrote: post #274

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…

There you go. I was about to call you out for associating Marty's name with the first type, but then I saw your edit. :-)

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people read his work, but few understand it. Maybe this is a flaw of the books, I don't know.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#313

Post by singron »

gardenhedge wrote: post #252
esafak wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project management was the role Larry Page once axed in 2001: https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...

Sounds like he fired a type of project manager - one who controlled the team. A project manager can manager the team by supporting them and unblocking them while doing non-implementation type work such as managing and reporting the project's budget, managing and reporting progress and delivery aims.

Google currently has program managers (and technical program managers). I could not tell you the difference between them and product or project managers.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#315

Post by sarchertech »

gretch wrote: post #112
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.

A lot of traditional engineering (civil, mechanical, etc) are non-competitive endeavors. For example, if you are supposed to make a bridge, you just design what you think a good bridge to be. In the modern consumer application, you have to understand business concepts like differentiation. If your product is very good, but it’s strictly worse than another product in every dimension, you don’t get any credit for secon…

Clearly there’s a difference between building a bridge and getting customers to use your free app, but the vast majority of Engineers aren’t working in big infrastructure projects. Even the ones who do are competing with everyone else who bids on the project.

And in software there are plenty of cases where the 2nd or 3rd place product gets tons of sales even if it’s strictly worse in every category. There are so many things that impact market success that are completely out of the hands of product or engineering.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#316

Post by languagehacker »

Lots of hubris coming out of this article, and likely a healthy helping Dunning-Kruger as well.

Product-level thinking isn't confined to PMs. In fact, a good engineer should be conversant on the most important aspects of the product they work on, and care about many of the same metrics.

Having a good product function in a company can be very impactful when it comes to scoping and prioritizing, validating ROI, understanding what success looks like, and ensuring that people take into account the real cost of the work they do.

Sometimes this means making sure that engineers aren't just building things they think are fun but pose no real ROI, or asking engineers for things they don't feel like doing, or -- the gravest of all crimes -- asking for status on in-flight progress, perhaps even in person. This is why these folks draw the ire of some of our less mature fellows.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#318

Post by IanCal »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #232
starky wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I saw one of these types of articles on here it quickly became apparent that a lot of companies don't know the difference and call their project managers by the wrong name.

What is the difference then, between a project manager, product manager, a project owner and a product owner? Always thought they're approximately the same thing. Isn't any product you're working on a project too?

Imo projects are company details, products are what your users see.

The split between project manager and product owner seems clearest.

A project manager is running the team. Who does what and when? How do we plan the work?

A product owner is kind of like the representative stakeholder. What should this do? How important is launching now Vs fixing these bugs?

How Vs what.

Good people in these roles are incredible. I've been fortunate to work with some.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#319

Post by IanCal »

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.

Navigating and driving the car are two very obviously distinct tasks that regular people and rally drivers split up.
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