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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

#21

Post by sergioisidoro »

> 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. Take your most competent sales person and put him in charge of the product

This is much worse. You'll end up doing what individual customers ask, lose product strategy and run the risk of having a guy in sales deciding the next features on the fly during sales meetings, promising stuff just to get that deal signed.

Some good points here, but it feels more of a symptom of other problems, like the lack of a tech lead who manages the team (so the PM ends up doing it)

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#22

Post by politelemon »

> Second, most product managers are not smart in the sense that they make good product decisions. Anyone can be a product manager, you just need to pretend to know how things work and have done other things in the past. Product managers really rarely evaluate themselves on the KPI they have achieved in the past. And finally if you are really good at taking decisions to make a company successful you will have started a company of your own a long time ago (Not everyone want to create their own company, yes I know, but the high performers do :) )

It's pretty clear that this is the author's view of a PM and not what PMs actually do. It is the premise, and an incorrect one at that, of the entire post.

Imagine such hyperbole flipped around and applied to developers, this would be receiving a lot more vitriol.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#24

Post by nickdothutton »

Where to start with this. All I will say is that the job of the Product Manager is if nothing else, to manage the product through the product lifecycle. Concept, development, release, revision, maturity, retirement/death, including likely migration to some new product/service that is a logical replacement. These core duties are most clearly exercised in small product-lead companies. In large firms the job can become very bureaucratic and political as everyone wants to put a hand on the ships wheel, especially if the company is a single-product company.

Edited for typo.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#26

Post by lovehashbrowns »

switch007 wrote: post #12

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

They think it’s their micromanagement that creates productivity. Sometimes it’s incentivized by upper management. The more noise they make the better they seem. So for example, a micromanaging PM will demand that all communication go through them. It can certainly help, but oftentimes adding a third person to a loop complicates things, not helps. Now there are three schedules to align! But the PM has to seem busy and productive so it’s better for them to be involved when it comes to optics, productivity be damned.

And god help you if your product is technical and your PM isn’t technical or knowledgeable enough. Conversations get fun when the PM says something wrong and you’re now trying to correct them “respectfully” in front of customers.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#27

Post by leoedin »

switch007 wrote: post #12

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've seen "product" done badly at multiple companies. I've still not seen it done very well. I think the problem is structural. Of all the areas of software development process that get cargo culted without careful consideration of actual effect, product management is the worst (with "scrum" a close second!)

Someone in management decides that "we need to be product led" and appoints a product manager or owner. They then either spend their time micro managing the development process, or making unrealistic goals which don't take into account the development team at all.

I have sometimes seen good product managers - people who are engaged enough with the development process to understand the state of things, and can suggest the right direction to take development work to meet external requirements. The problem seems to be that there's not an effective selection process for them. When an organisation is "product led" that makes the product manager a de-facto team leader (regardless of what people say) which makes it very hard for the developers to hold them accountable. There's limited objective metrics you can hire them against, and the person who does hire them is often their manager - less motivated by development productivity than by the appearance of productivity.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#29

Post by dohman »

The writer's trying to argue that product managers aren't useless, but that they have too much power. Okay, sure, but they go about it in the most confusing way possible. They start off by saying that developers who think PMs are useless are missing the point, which is fair, but then they go on this whole tangent about how PMs are actually important because they can help with decision-making and project delivery..?

And then they start shitting on PMs, saying that they're not actually that smart and they only like the discovery part of their job where they get to make all the decisions. And to top it off, they say that PMs in B2B companies are useless because they're not actually talking to the people who use the product... That's literally the job of a PM, to talk to customers and figure out what they want.

And then they go on to say that if you want to innovate, you shouldn't listen to PMs, but instead put your most competent salesperson in charge of the product. That makes no sense at all.

Sadly, as someone else said, I'd assume that this article was driven by poor experiences with a PM in the past. And it's not cool to take a bash at the whole segment due to having a bad experience with someone.

Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers

#30

Post by anentropic »

> 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?

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