271–280 of 314 posts
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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.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by that? Is it the standard scope creep / premature generalization pattern, or something else?
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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…
Definitely can take a while to find one though, that much is true.
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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…
>It’s like saying you don’t need a qa team because the developers tested it. Strangely enough, that's happening at a few companies (run by Amazon refugees IIRC) where they think that making devs do QA and removing QA/QE roles will speed delivery. I'm in one of those companies now, and I'm waiting for the #FAFO loop to happen.
If it's just clicking UIs all day long then obviously a QA should do it. Or have an UAT environment where a few more enthusiastic customers are willing to test and report bugs.
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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…
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> In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? The developer teams, who else? You build it, you need to know what you are building, right? I find it fascinating that the dev community that gobbled so easily "You build it, you run it", doesn't question why we are not being trusted with knowing and determining what to be built in the first place. > For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory comp…
> How often do you have a Product Manager who is an expert in regulatory/compliance laws and has contacts with government agencies? > Usually the Product Manager is Josh, who just finished uni, and a two weeks product manager course. They will have to ask experts, and then translate that to the devs. It's much more efficient to let the devs ask the experts, which will let the devs themselves become well versed in the…
> I have definitely seen this happen, but as a very senior engineer, now PM, I can tell you this is a management/hiring failure much more so than anything else
Makes me wonder if you're saying that these cases are the exception. In my career they have sadly been the rule. Not 100% literally, i.e. my PMs have never been 22 years old, but they were, 99% of the time, grossly incompetent.
And yes they were a management / hiring failure, absolutely, but it seemed that nobody cared... :(
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.
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In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory compliance laws, are you expecting every engineer to be an expert in those laws? And have contacts at the government agencies implementing those policies?
> In that scenario, who is driving product requirements? The developer teams, who else? You build it, you need to know what you are building, right? I find it fascinating that the dev community that gobbled so easily "You build it, you run it", doesn't question why we are not being trusted with knowing and determining what to be built in the first place. > For example, in an area with strict financial/regulatory comp…
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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.
No but "those people" is all people, to some extent. All people have life outside of work, like to make more money, see how unaffordable a house is and say "OK I need to earn $200k a year to raise a family the way I want". While they won't be so brazen, there is some effect of "doing thing thing that leads to the carrot". So the company needs to change that carrot - but it is hard because the whole industry has the c…
Never before have I heard such a good argument for formalizing the job. If architects or civil engineers were to do the same we had building collapsing left and right.
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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.
Engineers don't want to talk to the customer, so who will do so to know what to build? In startups, when building MVPs, YC and others will stress that the founders be talking to their customers, but this should not stop just because the company becomes larger.
Product Managers as they have become today (from my experience over the last decade+ in 7 companies) are far too involved in technical decisions (on which they most often have no clue about) and far too little involved in talking to real customers.
In the olden days (the 90s for me) we had people whose job was to track the pulse of customers to see what they needed and provide that feedback in an organized form to engineering leadership. At least in the companies I was in, their title was not PM (can't remember their exact title).
That was very useful, it gave engineering leadership a clear view on what customers like and what they hate and what they want in the next release. And it was not interference, as these people had zero say in engineering decisions.
Today the average PM is just meddling in technical decisions they are not qualified to have an opinion on and most of them don't really spend enough time with customers, their product direction is all based on their personal (largely uninformed) opinion.
Maybe there are still companies that do the PM role right, but I haven't met any.
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Project managers don't strategize or lead a vision of what the product should look like. It sounds like your strength is more in project management than product management so perhaps that's why the organizations tend to place you in that role?
If it wasn't clear, i'm a product manager that started in project management. The real problem is product management is hot, project management is old. I've been around the block enough times at different companies to form that opinion and thats OK. Product management is consistently project management with extra steps. Those steps being business and market analysis to solve customer problems. It seems businesses are…