The product manager role is a mistake • Hacker News Board

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#331

Post by plorkyeran » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 3:33 AM UTC

foota wrote: post #278

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

My experience with B2B PMs is that exactly one that I've worked with was amazing and the rest were just an awful intermediary that added a day of latency to any communication with our contact at customers and often managed to mangle things too.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#332

Post by Justsignedup » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 4:06 AM UTC

Nathanba wrote: post #309

Justsignedup wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

I mean we are all cogs in a machine. And I found that a smart effective team who works in unison can develop novel things. Combined with a visionary who sits above the team pointing the brainpower into interesting directions you get quite interesting results.

I think the power of teams is not in individual contribution, but when the team is significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#333

Post by mitemte » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 4:28 AM UTC

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…

I can relate to this. At my previous company, the first PM our team had was absolutely amazing. She had an engineering background but transitioned to management ten or so years ago. At some point, she was promoted and the replacement PM, while good, was not as good.

Fast-forward to my current company, the PMs here are absolutely shocking. The people they report to have no clue. It seems like every PM at my company has fallen upwards, as a result of newly hired PMs quitting shortly after they join. Engineers here are technically competent, but lack direction. Projects spin up before requirements have been defined, leading to massive losses of time. I’ve considered reaching out to my former company’s PMs to offer a referral, but it’d be a disservice to them.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#334

Post by intelVISA » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 4:31 AM UTC

FireBeyond wrote: post #282

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…

> 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 they wanted and chase the shiny newest techs. There's 3.5 main products (really 4.5) each made from a different tech stack. There's ano…

You can stil be engineering focused (whatever that means) and have strong leadership. The issue is that a person who lacks significant stake in the company (i.e. most) is not going to want to be a strong leader - you're just risking yourself as personally accountable for any failures vs. limited rewards.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#335

Post by fooster » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 4:36 AM UTC

jokethrowaway wrote: post #266

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 leade…

Customer relations under sales? Who does that??

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#336

Post by trog » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 4:43 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #300

trog wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of the "formal project" is the API by which executing the design can be understood by all stakeholders. It is a high level abstraction that allows all parties to understand what they need to do and when they need to do it. For large projects it is simply essential - you need your external vendors to plan their availability, months or sometimes years in ahead, so that they can commit to the timeline. If you're l…

> If you're lucky enough to work on large software projects where there are no managers or other stakeholders asking "and how long will this take, exactly?" then maybe the design is enough. How well can your project managers answer how long will this take? Because on my experience, 10000% delays are all but routine (ok, on construction it's usually bounded to something around 1000%). And how much value do people that…

If they are good project managers, they plan for non-routine delays and account for them in the project schedule. Before people are allowed to commit to schedule, the project managers make sure that these people have properly scoped and estimated their part of the work, by asking pointed questions, using their domain expertise and general experience to figure out if they're being bullshitted or not.

If things start to slip, they find out where and why and apply what pressure they can to get them on track. If they cannot get them on track, they then liaise with everyone downstream to make them aware of the slippage, adjust the entire schedule, and get everyone reorganised.

It's not just putting things in the calendar and forgetting about them - it's a constant, ongoing herding of cats to get them all going the same way.

It sounds like you just might not have been lucky enough to work with really great project managers!

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#337

Post by aryehof » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 5:26 AM UTC

A large proportion of software projects are internal systems which are not being delivered to external 3rd parties. Nor are they online products primarily for consumption by the public.

These are the systems that run the world in banking, finance, education, transportation, consumption, production, manufacturing and supply chain amongst others.

Stakeholders are internal and a Product Manager role really doesn't apply. I think it important to differentiate between types of software endeavor and much of the discussion here seems to view the software world and the need/role of a Product Manager narrowly.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#338

Post by kirso » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 6:08 AM UTC

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…

I never understood black and white thinking such as OP.

“Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” - Morgan Housel

Its the same with dating. If you date toxic people, you start generalising that all men are abusive.

Same with PMs. If you are working within a company that accepts subpar talent, you'll start seeing things based on your benchmark of quality. Until you actually work with a great PM that makes your life easier.

There are good engineers and bad engineers.

This polarisation is IMO an incredible bias.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#339

Post by ketzo » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 6:08 AM UTC

sarchertech wrote: post #261

ketzo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s fair, but that is… what, 1% of all software engineer hires?

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#340

Post by jasontheknight » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 7:37 AM UTC

This article boils down to "if you hire mediocre people then you get mediocre results". This is true for all disciplines. But, the biggest problem here is not poor product managers (although that often is a problem) but poor-FIT product managers. Anyone hiring a career Google or Amazon PM to manage products at an early-stage, sales-led B2B supply chain startup is almost certainly committing hiring malpractice. That's not to say that the PM isn't any good, or can't adapt, but I wouldn't trust the hirer to make a good decision one little bit.

Problems with PMs generally boil down to "they're not very technical" (mostly irrelevant, because there's much more to being a successful PM than being arbitrarily "technical"), "they're just a project manager"/"they're just a status update monkey", which does happen depressingly often. However, this "prod-ject manager" archetype is generally something imposed on the PM by a company that has no interest in having anyone do actual product management work. The "all metrics all the time" people do, of course, exist. There's a place for them in bigger companies that are primarily optimising what they've got, but they won't last 5 minutes at a lot of companies.

So much of what people criticise as bad product management (or, but extension, bad product managers) is actually a systemic lack of product management at all. Leaders hire the wrong type of people for a role they have no interest in supporting, with inevitable results. However, are we expecting that these same leaders are going to make A-grade hires in engineering? In my experience, the engineers who complain most about product managers are the ones that would benefit from (good) product management the most.