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More product, fewer product managers

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Re: More product, fewer product managers

#151

Post by rudasn »

vwolf wrote: post #47
atoav wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't that hard. Just have your developers train people with your software. In every craft you learn the moment the rubber hits the road. A film director can watch the film in the editing room a thousand times, but the one first time watching it with a real audience will teach them more than those 1000 hours together. A carpenter can work away on a piece of furniture merrily all week long and be happy with thems…

I can attest to that. I had worked on a product for a couple of years and received feedback from our support team, but never seen how the product was used in real life. One time, we had a specific bug that the customers were complaining about, and no matter how they described it, we couldn't figure out what the problem was. That was until I went to one of the customer sites and saw how the users were interacting with…

> That was the first time I really grasped the difference in how we approach software products.

For me as well. I've started my "career" this way, building something very specific for a client (family member) whilst being on prem and having constant and direct feedback, so that's how it was done I thought.

Almost twenty years later, having worked different roles with teams in office and remotely, I have to remind myself, and others around me, that we are building something to be used by real people with real problems and my/your software must not be one of them.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#152

Post by possibly_not »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #137
Hippocrates wrote: post #112

The problem with most PMs is that they are not doing boots-on-the-ground work. A good PM should be constantly bridging the gap between engineering and the user. 1. Map the product or idea being built to those who will use it. Present it, get users feelings on it, if it is viable and needed. Throughout development, gather continuous feedback by demoing, shadowing, and adapting to new feedback. Plan and execute a launc…

A great way to solve for this in B2B, is to hire a customer and train them as PM. They will hit the ground running much faster to bridge the gap.

Just so I understand, the best way to hire a product manager in B2B is to poach the employees of your customers?

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#154

Post by layer8 »

ChilledTonic wrote: post #9

Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream. I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just…

I don’t mind AI art except that it’s so often cringe. Half of the time I wonder if it’s meant tongue-in-cheek, or if the author really feels it’s an authentic fit to the article.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#155

Post by edderly »

The best product manager I worked with was just an exceptionally bright person, they were able to understand complexity of implementation (and even have a reasonable chance of doing it themselves) vs understanding the business need. Just basically a value add to the company without being an engineering manager.

Unfortunately most product managers are just people who sit in the role. They are just gatekeepers who take either credit or blame. They often have little skin in the game.

Overall, if you have a product management organisation, you're doing it wrong.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#156

Post by layer8 »

wruza wrote: post #81
ChilledTonic wrote: post #9

Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream. I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just…

Is it any worse than a photo model’s pipe dream about what they are shooting? People on stock photos rarely know anything about the profession or the situation they represent besides basic ideas like looking smart, busy or chatty. They just have to look good at the same time.

Blog articles you could take seriously didn’t use to have stock photos. It may not be worse, but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#157

Post by possibly_not »

ath3nd wrote: post #143
tashoecraft wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you haven’t had a good PM or a job that supports having one. Saying it’s often some new grad is like saying there’s no point having an on shore dev team because the devs are often fresh out of university. If you continually hire terribly you’re going to have a bad result. A PM should become the subject matter expert in the product they are developing. They should be able to field questions on most every p…

I can most certainly and confidently tell you that a dedicated QA team that only does testing is a total waste of money! A sre/platform team building fuzzy testing tools and mandating better testing practices is money much better spent. The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down owners…

>The developers MUST care for the quality, not outsource it to some external team. The desire of large corps to spend huge amount of $$$ to create artificial roles to water down ownership can never cease to astonish me.

As a former quality-focused dev, I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club. There is always somebody above you who cares only about their own career ambitions and has more leverage than you do. This leads to a horde of devs who just do what they're told and not much else.

Businesses are all about risk management. The safest way to de-risk a business is to water down ownership, at the cost of injuring quality-focused devs. You're only a cog. You need to only be a cog to them. They must to be able to replace you with another cog when you leave for greener pastures.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#158

Post by layer8 »

ChilledTonic wrote: post #9

Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream. I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just…

> the correct number of fingers

I like how one of the tablets seems to devolve into a paper notepad at the bottom, and how the notebook display on the right seems to be transparent and twisted.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#159

Post by DanielHB »

GiorgioG wrote: post #111

Most non-technical PMs I’ve worked with have been ineffective because they don’t understand or think in terms of systems, they only think in “screens” and “buttons”. Put me in the “get rid of product managers altogether” camp.

Being able to show a relational database schema to a manager and ask: "is this the data we need in the manner we need" is invaluable

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#160

Post by throwawaysugar »

possibly_not wrote: post #152
martin_drapeau wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great way to solve for this in B2B, is to hire a customer and train them as PM. They will hit the ground running much faster to bridge the gap.

Just so I understand, the best way to hire a product manager in B2B is to poach the employees of your customers?

A more charitable interpretation is poaching ONE such employee out of all your customers. It's not a criminal act, IMHO.

Managers of any company that think they can't afford to lose a single employee are doing something wrong and should google "key man risk"

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