Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

More product, fewer product managers

kitemaker.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 314 posts

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#71

Post by itronitron »

madeofpalk wrote: post #50
koliber wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often do have a clear image in my mind for an article. I can not draw it and I don't have the budget to hire someone to do it. The image is meant to convey a feeling. It is meant to make an abstract concept from the article a little more tangible. In the past, I'd search for images on the net that I could use to accomplish that. Now I can craft them with DALL-E, and they are usually much better. This image should c…

I don't know the exact word for the style, but this article is pretty egregious for the overly stylised "AI art". This just looks cheap, obviously "AI", and is pretty distracting for me. I don't know if that was the intention or not, but it's a detractor for me.

It looks like an ad for a shitty mobile game.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#72

Post by rjzzleep »

demondemidi wrote: post #67
bjornsing wrote: post #63

I've spent some time interacting with product managers as an engineering manager, or head of a functional area. I've also been "acting" PM for an internal product at a medium size tech company. I think product management entails some of the most important things a company does. But it's really hard work, and many less capable PMs gravitate away from it and more towards either "driving" (i.e. micromanaging) the engine…

“Politics” 35 years in the semi industry. I must be stupid. I really don’t see politics. I see people trying to argue for their option and get support. But I’ve never seen this politics that people complain about. I’m so lucky I guess. Is politics just someone making a better argument that is the wrong technical decision? What is “politics”? Or am I just not at a high enough level (senior principal)?

Politics is a when a company like Caterpillar spends a year trying to acquire GPU's for their autonomous vehicle teams, because they have 20 security and project managers that want to assert themselves in every conversation to get promoted, to get to senior leadership positions, while the company looses out to Chinese competitors they were ahead of.

Politics is also when middle managers and 2 engineers conspire to steal a coworkers work to get promoted and move up the silicon valley startup ladder, so that the company has to come back a year later to bring back the original engineer, because none of these people were capable.

If you haven't seen politics you might have been either blessed or didn't want to see it, but for every 1 company I worked with that was efficient I worked with 4 that were not.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#73

Post by gardenhedge »

bjornsing wrote: post #63

I've spent some time interacting with product managers as an engineering manager, or head of a functional area. I've also been "acting" PM for an internal product at a medium size tech company. I think product management entails some of the most important things a company does. But it's really hard work, and many less capable PMs gravitate away from it and more towards either "driving" (i.e. micromanaging) the engine…

A mini cto is an architect in this position

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#74

Post by koliber »

madeofpalk wrote: post #50
koliber wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often do have a clear image in my mind for an article. I can not draw it and I don't have the budget to hire someone to do it. The image is meant to convey a feeling. It is meant to make an abstract concept from the article a little more tangible. In the past, I'd search for images on the net that I could use to accomplish that. Now I can craft them with DALL-E, and they are usually much better. This image should c…

I don't know the exact word for the style, but this article is pretty egregious for the overly stylised "AI art". This just looks cheap, obviously "AI", and is pretty distracting for me. I don't know if that was the intention or not, but it's a detractor for me.

Quality of writing and quality of imagery varies a lot. It’s hard to do.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#75

Post by alistairSH »

ath3nd wrote: post #70
bjornsing wrote: post #63

I've spent some time interacting with product managers as an engineering manager, or head of a functional area. I've also been "acting" PM for an internal product at a medium size tech company. I think product management entails some of the most important things a company does. But it's really hard work, and many less capable PMs gravitate away from it and more towards either "driving" (i.e. micromanaging) the engine…

I don't believe in Product Managers or Project Owners as a net good towards building a better product or a better company. The most successful teams I have been in had no dedicated product role, instead, all decisions were made by the developers. My current view is best to remove all type of non technical people or even mildly technical people from the developers' way and let them build in peace.

In that scenario, who is driving product requirements?

For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory compliance laws, are you expecting every engineer to be an expert in those laws? And have contacts at the government agencies implementing those policies?

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#76

Post by gardenhedge »

demondemidi wrote: post #67
bjornsing wrote: post #63

I've spent some time interacting with product managers as an engineering manager, or head of a functional area. I've also been "acting" PM for an internal product at a medium size tech company. I think product management entails some of the most important things a company does. But it's really hard work, and many less capable PMs gravitate away from it and more towards either "driving" (i.e. micromanaging) the engine…

“Politics” 35 years in the semi industry. I must be stupid. I really don’t see politics. I see people trying to argue for their option and get support. But I’ve never seen this politics that people complain about. I’m so lucky I guess. Is politics just someone making a better argument that is the wrong technical decision? What is “politics”? Or am I just not at a high enough level (senior principal)?

It's possible you've never worked with politically minded people but I doubt it. It can be as small as an engineer broadcasting how hard a problem is before solving it. If they do that, they get the kudos for doing it. If they don't, it just gets done unnoticed.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#77

Post by ath3nd »

a3d wrote: post #29

Good devs with good communication == Better then PM Dev + Business = speed and customer centric Dev + PM + Business = one more layer, i.e. slow, i.e. some loss of customer voice I worked at Amazon as dev for 10 yrs. In early days 2001+. Amazon did not hire PMs then. Best of Amazon exp came out in that period. I was part of that myself. Pm is needed for things like building amazon prime. If at all.

That's a very based take!

The whole idea of a PM boils down to address a less qualified non technical middle man to make all the important decisions, while also pigeon hole your communications with the rest of the stakeholders.

Why does this role even exist is beyond me.

It's like we can't trust the engineers with any important decisions, so we need some business guy who took a two week course and now is suddenly qualified to be calling all the shots.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#78

Post by legendofbrando »

epgui wrote: post #69
demondemidi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Politics” 35 years in the semi industry. I must be stupid. I really don’t see politics. I see people trying to argue for their option and get support. But I’ve never seen this politics that people complain about. I’m so lucky I guess. Is politics just someone making a better argument that is the wrong technical decision? What is “politics”? Or am I just not at a high enough level (senior principal)?

Politics is what happens when you have limited resources and you need to decide where to allocate them. Politics are everywhere humans are.

Yes to this. Too many people complain about politics as if it is some “outside” force and not simply implicit in the way that human beings organize diversified interests. Since each of us can only embody our own world view, politics is inevitable.

I understand that what people typically mean is people who are “too political” where the pushing for interests stops being in service of some goal and starts to become its own point. But in trying to avoid the appearance of that, too many people fail to engage in any politics and in doing so actually cause more harm than good to what is important to them by missing the important point that it’s incumbent to speak up for things you need and believe in because people who allocate resources may have insufficient knowledge or insufficient time to dedicate to knowing your work that intimately.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#79

Post by allsunny »

I wonder what the author might suggest as an appropriate ratio of PMs to engineers might be. I generally like 1 per 10 person team. I also like the idea of not having a separate product tool but have yet to see a good tool that can satisfy software project management (eg Jira, Linear) and product ops (product board, Airtable).

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#80

Post by ath3nd »

anon23432343 wrote: post #15
freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #3

Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute…

I had project were we hade not difference between po, pm and scrum master. No difference at all on what they did.

All those jobs do look the same because they are all bullshit jobs which infantile developers assuming they can't do and decide anything for themselves but write code on command.
Post reply on HN