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More product, fewer product managers

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Re: More product, fewer product managers

#201

Post by andrekandre »

possibly_not wrote: post #157
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…

>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 lever…

  > I can tell you that the industry beats it out of you with a club.
yep, i can say i've seen this over and over; more than anything incentives are for the next okr or whatever to be completed so they can move on to the next one asap.

i've seen pr's sent out for review that literally didn't work or crashed immediately on use... as if the expectation is qa will report whatever needs fixing but thats fine cause its "in qa now" so development is "done".

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#202

Post by hkon »

Working in the industry around 20 years now. It has become painfully obvious that businesses are out of ideas. Speaking in simple terms. Product managers never really stick around long enough to learn enough about a market or a product to bring any valuable insights or new ideas to the table. Spend 1 year to push the "MVP" then it's off to the next one with a salary increase.

Used to be a product guy that was 20 years + with a firm would have lots of ideas and hammering the development teams to ship feature after feature. I just don't see that anymore in the places I lend a hand.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#203

Post by suction »

ako wrote: post #200
ath3nd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe in Product Managers or Project Owners as a net good towards building a better product or a better company. The most successful teams I have been in had no dedicated product role, instead, all decisions were made by the developers. My current view is best to remove all type of non technical people or even mildly technical people from the developers' way and let them build in peace.

I don't understand, how do you handle prioritization decisions: if you have a 100+ customers that all want something, how do you create understanding of all needs, how do you distill that to an integrated roadmap, and how do you align the roadmap prioritization decisions across 20+ teams? How do you organize updating of documentation, training materials, enablement of support, pricing decision, updating of price list…

By knowing the customers business and needs better than the customer, and be able to convince them that the best product possibly conceivable is not a Frankenstein’s monster put together from “100 ideas gathered from the costumers, prioritised by a PM”, but an opinionated tool created by opinionated people.

Of course you need the right developers for this, not code monkeys or offshore outsourced companies with a time zone and cultural barrier to overcome…

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#204

Post by idopmstuff »

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…

> He PMd 2 other tech teams the same way.

I'm with you that all of this is bad PM work, but this seems to be the root cause. I've been at a startup like this where there weren't enough PMs to start and then a couple left, which just led to the rest being stretched across more teams.

You just can't do much of anything useful in this situation - your existence consists of preparing for and attending stakeholder meetings. I guess some people thrive on the pseudo-glorified existence of "managing" a bunch of different teams, but I found it to be as miserable as you seem to have found it from the eng side. I was there to spend time with customers and designers and engineers, and after a few months of doing none of those things, I quit without a job lined up.

Once you get to that point, it can become even worse because you end up in this doom loop of management realizing that the core PM work is getting delegated to eng, thinking that this means they don't need as many PMs and then delegating more work to eng.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#205

Post by ethanbond »

starkparker wrote: post #187
intrasight wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> documents and sheets are created That sounds terrible and predictable. Data managed by a PM should be managed and presented in the same product dashboard used by everyone else.

When they can't use git and find project tracking software too complex to understand, this is what regularly happens. Either this or charts and tables in Miro/Figma boards.

This is too cynical IMO. Documents are actually the correct tool for some kinds of thought and communication. Issues are different, Miro/Figma boards are different.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#206

Post by anon3949494 »

ath3nd wrote: post #70
bjornsing wrote: post #63

I've spent some time interacting with product managers as an engineering manager, or head of a functional area. I've also been "acting" PM for an internal product at a medium size tech company. I think product management entails some of the most important things a company does. But it's really hard work, and many less capable PMs gravitate away from it and more towards either "driving" (i.e. micromanaging) the engine…

I don't believe in Product Managers or Project Owners as a net good towards building a better product or a better company. The most successful teams I have been in had no dedicated product role, instead, all decisions were made by the developers. My current view is best to remove all type of non technical people or even mildly technical people from the developers' way and let them build in peace.

I can definitely see how this is appealing for small technically oriented teams that want to move fast. It is likely however that your team will reach an inflection point and at some point having a *good* PM would be a net positive to the company.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#207

Post by Hasu »

ath3nd wrote: post #141
growse wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This tension is why it's a good idea to align everyone's incentives. Bonus the product team on reliability (as well as velocity), and the ops/sre team on feature velocity (as well as reliability), and it'll balance itself out.

Who is bonusing who? I think some people simply can't get rid of the idea that there has to be some external paternalistic figure that looks over developers' shoulder and guides the poor hapless saps and their incentives. Do they give candy to the good boys/girls and coal to the bad ones? You might be thinking of Santa. The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, e…

> The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, easy to sell, popular and reliable product.

Being on a team where everyone has a high level of personal ownership and accountability like that is truly wonderful, and I agree, it works great.

You just have to find (or build) a company that explicitly filters out the 99% of people who only want a job for the paycheck and don't care about the customers, the software, or the product.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#208

Post by ath3nd »

ryandrake wrote: post #199
ath3nd wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is bonusing who? I think some people simply can't get rid of the idea that there has to be some external paternalistic figure that looks over developers' shoulder and guides the poor hapless saps and their incentives. Do they give candy to the good boys/girls and coal to the bad ones? You might be thinking of Santa. The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, e…

> The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, easy to sell, popular and reliable product. The hard part is how do you design a compensation package for a developer or sre worker bee, to incentivize these? How do you make their bonus depend on something as nebulous and hard to measure as "greatness" or "popular"? For most employees, the candy/coal model works. You'r…

I might verging on socialism here, but I think the best way to motivate employees is ownership of the company and direct profit sharing.

Unfortunately, only the first part is practiced in my organization (company shares), but I am actively fighting for the second.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#209

Post by ath3nd »

eropple wrote: post #186
ath3nd wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The developer teams, of course. They are solving the problems, so why should they not prioritize them? They just need to have other parts of the org heard, but if you are solving it, you get to choose how to do it, in what order and with what priority. If that's not to somebody's liking, they are welcome to prioritize and solve the problems themselves.

> if you are solving it, you get to choose how to do it, in what order and with what priority In times of plenty, this works, and I think it can have high velocity. Especially with very small teams that all have high levels of direct investment in the result. There are also times of famine, however, and the work that keeps the lights on is often not work that even invested software developers want to prioritize. When…

> and the work that keeps the lights on is often not work that even invested software developers want to prioritize.

What kind of work is that? And why are the developers willingly not wanting to prioritize it, if the alternative of not doing it is becoming jobless? Do we need some kind of PM figure to say things like: "If we don't make this feature for the client, we are doomed, so start coding. Chop chop!". And do we need to keep that guy on the payroll for simply relaying a message?

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#210

Post by jasondigitized »

ath3nd wrote: post #70
bjornsing wrote: post #63

I've spent some time interacting with product managers as an engineering manager, or head of a functional area. I've also been "acting" PM for an internal product at a medium size tech company. I think product management entails some of the most important things a company does. But it's really hard work, and many less capable PMs gravitate away from it and more towards either "driving" (i.e. micromanaging) the engine…

I don't believe in Product Managers or Project Owners as a net good towards building a better product or a better company. The most successful teams I have been in had no dedicated product role, instead, all decisions were made by the developers. My current view is best to remove all type of non technical people or even mildly technical people from the developers' way and let them build in peace.

The worst products I have ever seen were when the developers acted like product managers. What you end up with are a bunch of really cool stuff that no one wants to pay for and only a few people find utility in.
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