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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#361

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

vsareto wrote: post #148
samtho wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regards to hiring, this is tricky because all candidates will try to put their best food forward and have a reasonable explanation for everything on their resume. In addition, low performers can look like high performers if their experience was painted by working at places with low expectations. I’ve hired very high performing people who later admitted to being PIPed many times throughout their career but these…

A bigger population just hasn't been trained properly. We have no controls for that, so people get lucky with disparate learning being just enough for their first job, then that turns into experience towards the next job. Then they find themselves among high performers and can't keep up, really through no fault of their own. Some high performers are just natural and born with it, which is unfair to let that affect ho…

If I hire a plumber to do work I don't care about his life experiences, he can either fulfill the obligation or not.

nowadays there's entirely too much of this externalizing responsibility and making excuses for people.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#362

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

sanderjd wrote: post #356
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is certainly a distinction between teams just dealing with their task backlog and project management. I wouldn't waste a project manager on that. Program management is a level above project management as you say, coordinating multiple projects. But there is definitely a space for complex single projects (not programs) that still require detailed planning and coordination. It's not really about personal preferen…

Yeah I was thinking last night that my comments here were a lot more strident about this than I am in real life. I agree with your whole comment, except I think the middle ground between team-level management and program management is more often better served by tooling, architecture, requirements, or team structure changes rather than project management. (I get it, sometimes the need for a lot of planning is imposed…

In our case we are a heavily regulated industry and the level of coordination, governance and compliance that is required to make change is shocking!

I agree that it's good if it's possible to avoid all that and still deliver what you need to!

Also agree that many people simply can't stand working in really heavyweight environments. While I dont love it, I can live with it.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#363

Post by sanderjd »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #362
sanderjd wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I was thinking last night that my comments here were a lot more strident about this than I am in real life. I agree with your whole comment, except I think the middle ground between team-level management and program management is more often better served by tooling, architecture, requirements, or team structure changes rather than project management. (I get it, sometimes the need for a lot of planning is imposed…

In our case we are a heavily regulated industry and the level of coordination, governance and compliance that is required to make change is shocking! I agree that it's good if it's possible to avoid all that and still deliver what you need to! Also agree that many people simply can't stand working in really heavyweight environments. While I dont love it, I can live with it.

Yep! I think, somewhat humorously for how this thread started - which was entirely mea culpa! - our perspectives on this are pretty closely aligned.

One thing I think is that a lot (though not all!) of the requirements imposed in heavily-regulated industries are actively counter-productive, because they more effectively introduce friction on positive changes than risky ones. But it's basically impossible to strike the exact right balance between mitigating tail risks, which is critical, vs. introducing counter-productive friction. So I have sympathy, I just also find it very frustrating to work in such environments.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#364

Post by breckenedge »

twoodfin wrote: post #56
breckenedge wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they really that smart if they’re ignoring those things? Talking to users has always been on my list of things required for engineers. A decade+ of low-interest-rate fueled growth in the tech sector has meant a lot of us have succeeded just by showing up.

In my experience, close technical customer-developer collaboration is incredibly valuable. What’s not great is customers arguing with engineers about which features to implement first or whether their bug report ought to have been backlogged. This is where a strong product role is essential.

I agree. Have the product team facilitate communications between customers and engineers and guide efforts towards development that has the biggest returns. Sadly I don’t really ever see it functioning that way anymore.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#365

Post by bazmattaz »

I'm a PM and am always interested to understand how I can get better at my craft and support my team better. I grabbed the comments of this thread and ran it through claude.ai to do some sentiment analysis and identify the key themes of the negative and neutral posts. Here is the response;

----------------------------------------------------

Based on sentiment analysis of the comments:

    37% have overall positive sentiment towards product managers
    28% have overall negative sentiment
    35% are neutral
Here are some suggestions for product managers to improve their craft based on the negative/neutral comments:

- Go beyond surface-level feature requests and dig into the root problems customers are facing. Observe real customer workflows and pain points. Identify the jobs-to-be-done and where the product is failing users.

- Collaborate closely with designers and engineers early in the process. Avoid tossing requirements over the wall. Co-design potential solutions and conduct design sprints together.

- Develop enough technical literacy to understand architectural constraints, make feasible suggestions, and earn engineers' respect. Take coding courses, read engineering blogs, attend tech talks.

- Focus on high-level goals and strategy rather than tactical execution. Don't micromanage - empower teams to determine solutions.

- Avoid reactive mode and spending all time in meetings. Block off strategic thinking time and deep work.

- Learn enough about data and analytics to identify leading indicators and qualitative insights. Don't just fixate on vanity metrics.

- Interview users, customers and frontline employees to build empathy and an outside-in perspective. Immerse yourself in the customer experience.

- Prioritize ruthlessly. Challenge teams to focus on true differentiators versus commodity features. Relentlessly cut scope.

- Focus on business impact and outcomes over outputs. Tie roadmap to company OKRs and strategy.

- Simplify and streamline processes that don't clearly add value. Remove unnecessary bureaucracy but maintain just enough process.

- Build relationships and credibility with engineering managers and team leads. Avoid throwing weight around.

- Develop storytelling and communication skills to paint a compelling vision and explain rationale.

The key is focusing obsessively on customers, leaning into strategy over execution, and enabling teams versus controlling them. PMs create the most value through vision, prioritization and strategic clarity.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#366

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

sanderjd wrote: post #363
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our case we are a heavily regulated industry and the level of coordination, governance and compliance that is required to make change is shocking! I agree that it's good if it's possible to avoid all that and still deliver what you need to! Also agree that many people simply can't stand working in really heavyweight environments. While I dont love it, I can live with it.

Yep! I think, somewhat humorously for how this thread started - which was entirely mea culpa! - our perspectives on this are pretty closely aligned. One thing I think is that a lot (though not all!) of the requirements imposed in heavily-regulated industries are actively counter-productive, because they more effectively introduce friction on positive changes than risky ones. But it's basically impossible to strike th…

Yeah, we aren't too far apart! It's why I like HN, you can actually have a civilised conversation :)

Friction certainly makes it harder to introduce positive change. I don't think it makes it easier to make riskier ones though, but you often can't do everything you'd like to get done.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#367

Post by inemesitaffia »

musha68k wrote: post #101

> Picasso, Jeff Bezos, Mozart, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Elon Musk, Robert Oppenheimer, Peter Thiel, Leonardo, and others are worshipped by the masses. I hesitantly have to give Elon Musk credit for proliferation of EVs and - yes, highly questionable - because of finally completing DARPAnet’s original mission via starlink’s usage in ongoing Ukraine war… (yikes, lot of “offset” should IMO be considered; on many ”front…

Celebrated rather than worshipped.

Thiel is the philosopher behind all this.

I believe there's a recent interview with him originally in German.

A lot of the way you see tech companies operate today started with him

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#368

Post by sanderjd »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #366
sanderjd wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! I think, somewhat humorously for how this thread started - which was entirely mea culpa! - our perspectives on this are pretty closely aligned. One thing I think is that a lot (though not all!) of the requirements imposed in heavily-regulated industries are actively counter-productive, because they more effectively introduce friction on positive changes than risky ones. But it's basically impossible to strike th…

Yeah, we aren't too far apart! It's why I like HN, you can actually have a civilised conversation :) Friction certainly makes it harder to introduce positive change. I don't think it makes it easier to make riskier ones though, but you often can't do everything you'd like to get done.

Just to clarify, I didn't mean regulatory friction makes it easier to do things that are risky. I think regulation is pretty much entirely successful at making that harder. What I meant is that, in my view, regulations that reduce the chance of tail risks by let's say X% often seem to increase the friction on making improvements by more like say 2X%. Of course this isn't scientific or anything, but it's my intuition, that the trade-off doesn't seem to be 1:1 when you take on some friction to reduce the likelihood of some tail risk.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#370

Post by camila45 »

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