Ask HN: Boss with Steve Jobs Complex

Dear Community Members,

I find myself in a difficult situation, but one I imagine must be common in the industry -- MY BOSS HAS A STEVE JOBS COMPLEX. It would be unfair to say he is like Steve Jobs, because the Steve Jobs we all love was relentlessly dedicated to his projects, but my boss is not. Let me explain --

My boss was appointed Project Manager, but he also wants to be Product Manager. He insists that we all absorb his vision and build out the product and code it. However, he refuses to detail out each screen, behaviors, and the like. When we try to build out the screens/behaviors, he cites it as a waste of time and directs us to code out the vision.

Naturally, the results are usually misaligned with his vision, and we get chewed out and humiliated publicly. There are often mentions about how he is a visionary and needs a team that can march to that vision.

Our boss is very successful and insightful, but has never been a product manager. He refuses to acknowledge Product Management as a role and insists we should have the startup mentality where everyone has every role -- yet does not want to slog through the difficulty of defining the user experience.

He is very hard-working but has many responsibilities and only dedicates about 4 hours a week to this project. Is this project destined for failure?

I have no way of knowing whether your project is destined for failure. But to me that would be almost irrelevant - if I had a boss who humiliated people (publicly or privately), I'd be looking for work elsewhere. I wouldn't have put up with that kind of abuse even from Steve Jobs himself.

I have read so many stories of tough personalities like this who chew out their people publicly, yet in the process achieve greatness for themselves, their teams, and their products. I supposed I would have accepted this if I were working for Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Steve Ballmer, so I keep wondering if I should just suck it up and grind on.

But coding-to-vision rather than coding-to-design/spec seems so inefficient. Is this common?

@theandrewbailey -- regarding how much other team members devote to the project, the rest of us work 40 to 50 hours a week. This is to be expected since a 10 minute vision takes 100x the time to actually code out and make functional. But to be honest, we are all putting in less and less productive time, as the whole process seems so inefficient and wasteful.

I've unfortunately been in the position of your boss in the past. In some of my early product management/project management roles, I would wave my hands write a few emails, one-pagers and expect the developers and designers would grok the vision and build something beautiful. Surprisingly, in my first experience, the outcome was wonderful -- the product was beautiful. At that time, I was naive and vainglorious enough to believe that the reasons for it were my 'vision'. The actual reason was a team of world class ux designers, visual designers and developers, who understood what I needed and created the product. The creative vision was theirs. So in some sense your boss is right, he doesn't have a unicorn team who can translate his day dreams into product.

On the other hand he is also profoundly wrong. Skip a few years, and I started up on my own, and could no longer afford those unicorn designers and developers. Now mere vision was no longer sufficient, I had to deal with actually firing up Photoshop and Illustrator and going from there all the way to writing HTML/CSS/JS, even the backend python for a prototype (Fortunately, I've always loved coding.) The learning was profound. Translating vision(even your own, leave alone others') into attractive product is a difficult skill that every serious product owner must understand. And they can only do so by doing (they may never master it). I'm not anywhere as good as those unicorn UX/devs I worked with in the past, but I compensate for it somewhat with, meticulous communication, verbal discussions, wireframes, mocks, sketches, functional prototypes, whatever, to get the product I want. Then I iterate the hell out of it by getting feedback. Learning to interpret subtle signs of friction in a users' experience was hugely valuable. The results have been good though slow.

If your boss is refusing to acquire the requisite translation skills, you will need to acquire them (and you will probably be the gainer in the bargain)

My advice to you here is to do the following:

1. Ignore the public shaming, if possible, and focus on your boss's message. Iterate on design concept despite his demeaning you for mistakes. It may eventually make you the unicorn developer/designer. At the very least even if you realize you don't have a talent for design, you will understand where your own limits lie.

2. Understand that the kind of people your boss is looking for do exist. They are not easily found, and are usually very expensive. So help your boss find one if possible. Learn from these people.

3. When you've gotten these skills, please email me your resume. :-) (Just kidding)