AFAIK Apple doesn’t have any PM roles for their major products. Think about that for a second.
The most successful product company doesn’t have Product Managers.
Saying this as a product person.
B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
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Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve seen this in dealing with Microsoft. Product Managers at these companies all have a type A personality in general. If you want excessive politics and everyone fighting and being a dumb ass it’s the product managers at big companies. 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 manag…
You’re aware that Microsoft didn’t even have a Product Manager title until last year, right?
I worked there for 13 years and worked with a lot of people with the title of Product Manager, or "PM" to be specific. And no, we didn't call them "project managers".
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#123I've seen PMs "scope creep" themselves to boost their CVs for when they leave and go somewhere else. These PMs suck. They are the type to lead meetings I was a PM for 4 years in a startup. I helped the engineers avoid (most) meetings, I was obsessed with our customers and their pain points - and spoke with them frequently; as well hyper-obsessed with the competition and where we could improve. I took suggestions from…
This is marriage material. Well said.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#124This article is pretty wrong, but look at the upvotes. It obviously speaks to a lot of people. I think it says more about the disconnect between dev and product, than the actual sins of product people.
And if those engineers read to the last line, I think they would pretty surprised at the author’s conclusion: > Take your most competent sales person and put him in charge of the product.
This is great advice. I think people are reacting badly, because they are skipping over the word "competent" and attributing a lot of malice to the word "sales".
I think it says more about the disconnect between dev and sales, than the actual sins of sales people.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#125AFAIK Apple doesn’t have any PM roles for their major products. Think about that for a second. The most successful product company doesn’t have Product Managers. Saying this as a product person.
I can easily imagine that.
My comment elsewhere aligns to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34867766
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve seen this in dealing with Microsoft. Product Managers at these companies all have a type A personality in general. If you want excessive politics and everyone fighting and being a dumb ass it’s the product managers at big companies. 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 manag…
> I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way. Ten years of experience at various startups, and it is absolutely this way.
It’s worse. PMs have a tendency to try and creep their way into CEO at startups.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#127> ...to facilitate decision making, make the project move forward. This is what is called “delivery” in the product management discipline. And this is usually the part that “Product managers” hate doing. The other part is “discovery”, it is meant to discover what to build, and this is the part that “Product managers” love doing.
>If you are a startup B2B founder, I want to give you one piece of advice, don’t ever give a lot of power to product managers as long as you want to innovate.
The article seems to make the point that PMs both love exploring and finding out what people want but also that they don't and that is the issue.
It seems the author started by arguing project managers are all over the place, and (my line of thinking) that B2B companies therefore should be focused more on execution and delivering, not just finding a bunch of cool new tech/ideas to pursue.
But then in the next few paragraphs they diverge by saying PMs actually stifle innovation because they want to look at data and improve things. They don't actually want to imagine something brand new.
This makes no sense. I would agree that in a B2B environment, you want things that work, not a shiny new UI and new products every couple of months. Businesses are focused on revenue, not flashy new things like consumers might be. They want to know if it works. And if you're selling to other businesses, reliability is far more important than new features. Why does everyone use SAP and Oracle? It is certainly not because they innovate.
I think the author just got very confused with their points and didn't know how to argue against PMs, but they clearly have a vendetta.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#128Why 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
This. Some product folks know their industry well and have actual hands-on experience building something in the same ballpark. They are a joy to work with. Even if they don't do their job particularly well, you can ask them real questions and trust them to make reasonable decisions. They have an intuitive sense of what does and doesn't work for the target audience.
Product folks who don't have domain experience always seem to fail, no matter how hard they work. Their opinion is not trustworthy on important topics. To compensate for their obvious lack of merit, they HUSTLE. They fall into the trap of crowd-sourcing ideas, insisting on design patterns that make no sense, and micromanaging a project to death with story points. They pathologically avoid any tough decisions (because deep down they know they don't have the skill or knowledge to make them) and prefer to focus on small tractable tickets that they show visible progress. No matter how well they run their processes, their lack of domain experience will almost ensure poor quality.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#129Devs working directly with customers will always be better than relying on PMs to do it. But it's hard to find devs with the soft skills needed, and are willing to do so.
Those people are generally referred to as product managers
In my experience, most PMs aren't software engineers.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#130> What matters is to make your customers happy, and sometimes, and pretty often this is not needed, so all time spent on it is time you will not spend on the most important people, your customers. I don't understand, this seems to say: "all the time spent on making your customers happy is time not spent on your customers" ...huh?
"it" is what USER wants, as opposite to customer. One of the key takeaways from the article should be that in B2B the customer is often is not the user.