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More product, fewer product managers

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Re: More product, fewer product managers

#241

Post by jsdwarf »

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.

That may only work if the target group of your product are developers, then it's not a suprise they have a clear understanding what's valuable to them.

If your product targets customers outside of the IT department, it's a whole different picture.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#242

Post by 015a »

One thing I've been thinking more-and-more about recently:

People are unique; there's no doubt about that. But how much of "the product manager does product management" is genuinely just the title they're assigned, versus some innate capability they were born with?

I'm becoming more agreeable to the notion that, at least in product development: most people should be doing more things. People can and should have specialization; but maybe it should be more organic and nuanced, like "Mike is our API guy, but he's also pretty good at organizing large projects and if you've got a big architectural ick to work through definitely go talk to him" versus "Sarah is more on the product side, she'll have great insight into user experience and she knows who to talk to in the organization to get decisions made faster, but she can also take on some smaller frontend tickets."

My argument isn't really "great idea dude, let's get rid of titles"; because I think the critical part is, this mindset is deeply predicated on Agency. You need an organization that assigns High Definition and High Agency to teams. You also need a hiring process that, very specifically, treats Personal Agency as one of the most important qualities a candidate can have; you don't know Go, that's cool, we can teach you Go, what we can't teach you is the genuine desire to want to be taught Go, and Rust, and some language I haven't even heard of, and by the way you're interested in the overall business and revenue and such.

The obvious problem is, people like that are a vast minority, and maybe you can't really scale companies by relying on the people you hire being intelligent generalists. I think there's also something to be said in the force multiplication of technology. A room with five of the right people can be more effective and productive than a skyscraper of 500.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#243

Post by jsdwarf »

flappyeagle wrote: post #131
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.

The best PMs I’ve worked with were HIGHLY technical, either in the same areas as the developers or in adjacent areas, like product design, or the domain of the product PM for retail company did long stints in merchandising at Costco PM for spreadsheet company was a former banking analyst Most companies hire under qualified generalist PMs who have to learn everything about their market from scratch; it’s very challeng…

Sounds good in theory, but what if your company decides to reduce investments in the spreadsheet product and instead transfer the product team into a much faster growing product segment, e.g. SAP integrations?

Then the perfectly qualified PMs start from square one again.

IMHO it's an essential skill for a PM to familiarize him/herself with a new domain in short time. It also offers cross-pollination / the chance to do things different. Imagine Steve Jobs coming from a pure IT background instead of liberal arts / calligraphy -> Apple wouldn't have been so different any more.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#244

Post by pitched »

015a wrote: post #242

One thing I've been thinking more-and-more about recently: People are unique; there's no doubt about that. But how much of "the product manager does product management" is genuinely just the title they're assigned, versus some innate capability they were born with? I'm becoming more agreeable to the notion that, at least in product development: most people should be doing more things. People can and should have speci…

People with a lot of personal agency in this way will also slow things down by expecting rational decisions from management and asking questions when they aren’t. I think this makes for a fantastic partner, peer or co-worker but a horrible employee. So I don’t think it’s too surprising that most hiring managers will be actively filtering them out.

As someone who does very highly value this way of thinking though, how would you try to detect it in an interview setting as an interviewee? That’s like asking them if they have good culture.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#245

Post by growse »

ath3nd wrote: post #136
growse wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I care only about one thing: solving the problem! Who prioritises the problems?

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.

> They are solving the problems, so why should they not prioritize them?

> If that's not to somebody's liking, they are welcome to prioritize and solve the problems themselves.

There's two types of problems that developers solve. Problems that they, themselves created (oh no, I wrote a bug), and problems that are given to them.

The second type (traditionally, the "business problems") are being prioritized and solved by the people who care about them. Namely, the CEO and the exco. Those guys set overall strategy, culture etc. and then the delegate the implementation and some of the detail to people with more expertise.

Developers do not run the business. They are delegated to to solve specific problems in the context of running the business. Not all of the business' problems will be solved by developers, but all of the business' problems should be solved in a coherent and harmonious way that accounts for the context of all the other problems in the domain (market, regulatory, finance & tax etc.)

For a specific product, the place where this context is managed is usually by someone wearing a hat with "Product Manager" written on it.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#246

Post by Feathercrown »

mike_hearn wrote: post #166
ath3nd wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the medical field which is fairly heavily regulated as well. My teams have been able to do our job without having a dedicated medical compliance expert as their PM. We just have a medical compliance team and ask them for input, but they most certainly don't tell us what to build nor drive the product direction. In short, I question the need of a PM, not the need for domain experts (law,financials,etc).

If you've had good results without a PM you probably had someone who was doing that work, but under a different job title. Or the results weren't as good as you thought. Good PMs are often engineers or ex-engineers themselves. But a good PM will do a much better job than just sticking a bunch of engineers in a room and asking them to manage the product. A lot of developers really hate tasks like: - Designing UIs - Th…

I kinda like doing those things

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#247

Post by daemonologist »

thfuran wrote: post #97
SushiHippie wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1717jqk/chatgpt_da... Yeah DALLE-3 has this in the system prompt. > Diversify depictions of ALL images with people to include DESCENT and GENDER for EACH person using direct terms. Adjust only human descriptions. > EXPLICITLY specify these attributes, not abstractly reference them. The attributes should be specified in a minimal way and should directly describe their physical…

>Don't alter memes, fictional character origins, or unseen people. I wonder what not telling it to avoid altering unseen people does.

That is quite interesting. Maybe they're trying to keep it from manifesting additional people - if the user requests a scene where logically more people are present than visible (maybe it's first-person, or the view from the front row of a theater) and ChatGPT crafts a prompt which describes the physical characteristics of the unseen people, Dall-e will probably include them in the image it generates.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#248

Post by epgui »

bjornsing wrote: post #132
epgui wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not the good side of politics, it’s how it’s defined in textbooks.

I don’t think those textbooks attempt to define the concept in this context. Like it or not, “corporate politics” is a well established term.

Consider whether the stuff you’re thinking about is “politics” or merely “stupidity” or “malice” (or some combination of these). I see no need to mix up the words.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#249

Post by atoav »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #51
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…

“Incentives” if you do this you better make it pay so I never have to leave. If I have to leave to get a payrise then I am getting on the Omega Star team and slowing down their ISO timestamp roll out to get GraphQL on my CV, so I can hit levels.io and get that extra $100k TC. /s but Poes law applies.

I don't think your company is worse off if you get rid of those people by giving them a taste of the real world.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#250

Post by ako »

ath3nd wrote: post #220
ako wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? That does seem to require at least a PHD in prioritization or a totally real role like a Product Manager indeed! A naive approac…

PM is not a junior type of job for someone called josh. In my experience it’s a full time job, requiring experience in the customer problem domain, and engineering experience.
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