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More product, fewer product managers

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Re: More product, fewer product managers

#171

Post by steveBK123 »

"Expose everyone to users " - I would note this of course has logical limits. I've worked in orgs where we had shared slack channels (and DM ability) with all customers. Not great.

This meant that squeaky wheels got a lot of oil. They quickly figured out who in the channel actually knew what they were doing, and so every customer had their pet senior engineer they would bother all hours of the day / weekends / etc with questions. Support rotas and on-calls go out the door when your customers can directly escalate to their engineer of choice.

I actually turned off all slack alerts and disabled notifications on my phone as a mental health exercise as a result. So the net result of forcing me to be maximally reachable caused me to be less reachable as a whole. If someone important enough really needed me, they had text/phone/etc.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#172

Post by jonhohle »

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…

> advocating for better is money much better spent

That seems like a very Bay Area mindset - advocacy is more lauded than doing something.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#173

Post by cloudking »

In my experience in multiple roles (product manager, project manager, software engineer) and dozens of successful launches with large engineering teams, the ideal kind of PM has a deep understanding of users, how software should work best for them AND technical experience.

The problem with a purely technical team and no user-centric PM guidance is they'll end up building an engineering designed product, that doesn't resonate with non-technical users. As pure engineers, we love engineering, and may over-engineer solutions given the opportunity. Unless we are building some developer tools or highly technical product, this doesn't work for the majority of non-technical products.

You need a PM who can separate the technical design from the user experience, but also understands how to bridge the two when it comes to actually building the product. No technical experience rarely helps, as you spend a lot of wasted time debating why things should or can't be built.

As a PM with technical background, I'm not going to waste engineering time proposing radical user experiences that I know will require excess resources and time to build. At the same time, deeply understanding what users want, I'm not going to build a product that is too technical for them to understand how to use. We understand the limits of our technical stack and how to reduce user frustration. That is the advantage of having a balanced PM with both user and technical experience.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#174

Post by smcin »

DanielHB wrote: post #145
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…

> But most of them seem to think they can operate entirely in document-land and just crank out roadmap docs and keep stakeholder alignment via endless check-ins and nagging. They are doing a "project manager" job instead. They are not managing product, they are managing stakeholders

Mainly internal stakeholders, I take it. Isn't all that entirely big-company politics?

Whereas a PM in a small company can devote more attention to the product, customers, market, metrics.

What's a good question to ask to find out which sort of animal you're dealing with?

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#175

Post by nip »

phillipcarter wrote: post #163
nip wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe OP meant « implementation » with « how ». You want a PM that knows the product (really) well and brings new work to the developers in the form of well documented problems, not solutions. You don’t want your PM to get involved in the technical details.

Careful here! > not solutions Often yes, solutions. When you're still in the "what are we building" phase you want a good PM deeply involved in the process. I think you may have implied that, but solution creation happens before code gets written. You also sometimes want a PM to get involved in technical tradeoffs when they impact the user experience. I've found that this happens more often with a technical product (…

Agree on all counts!

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#176

Post by ath3nd »

jonhohle wrote: post #172
ath3nd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> advocating for better is money much better spent That seems like a very Bay Area mindset - advocacy is more lauded than doing something.

Fair enough!

I used "advocating" loosely here. I hate the "advocate a lot, build nothing" mindset myself, and I am not a fan of the Bay Area and its practices (to put it mildly), so I edited my post.

What I mean is devs making tools for devs, resulting in better overall quality.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#177

Post by wimp »

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 think my brain automatically blocks out stock photos, because I didn't even notice this post had an image.

But there's something funny about this. The blog template requires an image bucket, so mindlessly fill it with something, right? Too hard, so find a bland stock photo. Too hard, so purposefully generate a bland stock photo. Uninspired tasteless AI garbage is going to overtake everything in short order.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#178

Post by ath3nd »

steveBK123 wrote: post #167
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…

My team was product managed by a gutless PM who essentially made senior devs & tech leads do all the legwork. Requirements gathering, mean user upset about a bug, weekly status call, need to break some bad news re: priorities? - send a senior dev or tech lead. Skipped most of the agile ceremonies too, busy guy. Never wrote or edited a JIRA ticket, that was for tech org to manage. He PMd 2 other tech teams the same wa…

> Management worshipping at the throne of agile become really enthralled with these guys and can derail an org for years. In theory a PMs stakeholders are the users, but in practice it is buffing the egos of the senior management that hired them. Can become a self reinforcing closed loop between senior management / agile consultants / PMs.

Beautifully put!

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#179

Post by hilux »

I've been a PM in a few B2B companies, and the reality of the job was never even close to the ad, i.e. we (PMs) never had authority over either Engineering or Marketing.

"Product-led" is today's buzzword, but I'd have to personally experience it before I believe it.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#180

Post by hilux »

jack_riminton wrote: post #127
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…

Having been a PM (now developer) the problem I faced was half the time I was having to provide documentation, communications and evidence for my managers. Which is of course fine but when you have HIPPO syndrome (HIghest Paid Person in the Office) who likes to make product decisions then you have to spend most of your time covering your back and managing up PMs get a lot of stick, sometimes justified, but they're jus…

PM->Dev is not the typical trajectory, although it's one I'm considering.

How do you feel about the transition?

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