31–40 of 148 posts
This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly. Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B st…
The issue is, what's the scope of an efficient PM. Should they involve in product development process ? Should they involve in the UX design process ?
It only sounds like PMs have all the power because they put the tasks in the order that you work on them in, after haggling with all the other stakeholders.
I'd guess that the PM in the story trying to get some evidence to backup a decision/convince someone of something.
My experience of bad PMs is that they live in the Y side of the XY problem space[0] and believe they should have total say over how the engineers and designers spend every minute of their time.
Thankfully my company has a great CPO and we have agreed to avoid this type of PM. Anyone who says that the PM should be the Product CEO is not hired. Anyone who says they are the one to define how the engineering teams work is not hired.
At a truly tech lead organization, PMs work for the engineering teams, not the other way around. We have some great PMs who collaborate and provide lots of value.
As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably, you can immediately assume the author has no idea what they’re talking about. Convenient this article did that early on, saves everyone a lot of time.
This is quite common. Lots of ex-project managers are now called product managers or scrum masters. But they're actually project managers.
All those PMs that fancy themselves mind readers in that they believe they can define what the customer needs and what the developers should build, without hearing their perspective first, are just bad managers with a different name.
> The consequence of that is interviewing users in B2B is almost useless, and taking decisions from what users tell you is a severe error and in most cases the path to stagnation. Who would come up with such a nonsense? Regardless of B2C or B2B, knowing what your users need solved is crucial, irrelevant who eventually the buyer is (user vs Manager)
The issue with B2B is that the decision makers are not the users of the product. You need to convince the decision makers first, as otherwise you'll not sell. Hopefully, the decision makers value user requirements as well.
This is why we strive to talk to the actual users as well, to understand what the company really needs.
Some companies are worse than others, but I've got many examples of how the team manager, and everyone above, was unaware of essential procedures performed by users, sometimes even on a daily basis. Without which operations would grind to a halt.
Similarly I also have many examples of companies where the higher-ups selected a competitor without considering their users, and it all ending in tears as the product couldn't do what was actually needed for daily operations. Most of them struggle for a while to make it work, before pulling the plug and coming to us.