11–20 of 148 posts
As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably, you can immediately assume the author has no idea what they’re talking about. Convenient this article did that early on, saves everyone a lot of time.
Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs"
Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly. Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B st…
Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it). The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"
Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way.
At the larger companies the people who spend all their time fighting for power seem to be product managers.
It doesn’t make sense at all to me why these people get specifically hired and put into these roles. Because people who want power are defined by the trait of not listening and that is exactly what a Product manager is supposed to be an expert at: Listening.
So you hire people who are guaranteed not to be good at listening and of course you get really bad results.
I think most of these product managers choose these roles because they are more interested in power. Or their managers want power.
Except this is true of anyone in the company. Unless the author says who is capable of making these really good decisions this article is empty rant.
Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
Because those skills require actual experience and domain-expertice . You can't factory print MBAs that actually give you skills, but you can create the illusion of value by teaching something , so they throw out a bunch of random econ and ways to control employees and everything gets a little bit worse everytime someone graduates
As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably, you can immediately assume the author has no idea what they’re talking about. Convenient this article did that early on, saves everyone a lot of time.
This, plus if you see them mentioning the Henry Ford ‘quote’ about horses you can reliably close the browser tab because they’re about to build a straw man argument against doing basic customer/user research.
There are a lot of products, especially in enterprise or B2B where the customer is not someone asking for a faster horse. They themselves are innovators and they want something they’ll use and pay for.
So there is certainly value in pouring through the data and finding the best value to build next. And for that a PM is pretty important to lead product.