The Accountability Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: The Accountability Problem

#31

Post by Esophagus4 » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

A bit rambling and meandering, but some decent points in there I guess. Lost me on the elephants.

Setting goals on estimated value vs measured value is the difference between a process goal and an outcome goal.

I guess the idea is you can’t control outcomes, but you can control your process inputs.

In baseball, for example, if you want to be a good hitter, don’t set a goal to hit .300, set a goal to do the things that will make you a .300 hitter. “I want to take 50 swings in batting practice per day. I want to workout once per day. I want to spend 30 minutes watching films of the next pitcher I’ll face…” etc.

In reality, it’s probably a little of both. For example, Sales teams are often compensated on revenue generated (outcome), but what if you did a good job (process) but didn’t hit your numbers because the market was just really bad in your vertical? A good leader will recognize this and still compensate you (i.e. hold you accountable) appropriately rather than punishing you for the outcome.

If one leader hits their targets in an easy environment, and another misses but comes close in a really challenging environment by being really creative and scrappy and clever, the second leader should be the one with the big reward.

You should be judged on how well you play your hands, not solely whether you win the game.

Re: The Accountability Problem

#32

Post by MrDarcy » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

alphazard wrote: post #29

Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product m…

I’ve struggled for a decade to pin down my frustration with most product owners and it’s this at the root. They are often true imposters. At a startup they are shielded by CEO founders who beat the imposter syndrome drum, giving legitimacy to their incompetence.

Re: The Accountability Problem

#33

Post by amelius » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:30 PM UTC

MrDarcy wrote: post #32

alphazard wrote: post #29

Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product m…

I’ve struggled for a decade to pin down my frustration with most product owners and it’s this at the root. They are often true imposters. At a startup they are shielded by CEO founders who beat the imposter syndrome drum, giving legitimacy to their incompetence.

But somehow nobody is calling them out for it.

I suppose they quickly choose the side of the user, saying "you don't have to convince me, I'm just playing the user role here".

Re: The Accountability Problem

#34

Post by alphazard » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

MrDarcy wrote: post #32

alphazard wrote: post #29

Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product m…

I’ve struggled for a decade to pin down my frustration with most product owners and it’s this at the root. They are often true imposters. At a startup they are shielded by CEO founders who beat the imposter syndrome drum, giving legitimacy to their incompetence.

A whole generation has come up thinking that it's normal for the direction of the product to be guided by the dumbest, least competent people in the room. Pretty much every tech company has, or aspires to have a product org.

The best intuition pump I have for product managers is the analogy of hedge fund managers. There exist people who can predict the market, just like there exist people who can predict how a product or feature is received by the market. Most people claiming to can't. The people who can are expensive. You can't reliably train white collar workers to be hedge fund managers, and you can't reliably train white collar workers to lead product development.

That mostly encapsulates all of the "but this guy at Apple" objections that get thrown around by people defending product orgs, as if they were a business insight that most of us don't yet understand.

Re: The Accountability Problem

#35

Post by drooby » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

alphazard wrote: post #29

Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product m…

I was spoiled at my first company out of college. My director cared deeply about product specs, acceptance criteria, and making sure engineers actually understood product and business decisions. It was so nice.

Oh, how sweet and naive I was to the world… hahah.

It still blows my mind that product isn’t treated like a soft engineering discipline in its own right. When product doesn’t do its own thinking, the cognitive load shifts to engineering. Suddenly, engineers are doing parts of product’s job. The result is predictable: engineering gets stretched thin, and both Product and Engineering fail to fully document or even understand what they’ve built.

The project falls apart because Product drops the ball, but Engineering is the team at the end of the funnel, so the blame naturally tends to land on them. Product’s output is often hidden, and it’s easy for them to say, “Well, we did our part. Engineering just didn’t deliver.”

Re: The Accountability Problem

#36

Post by alphazard » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #33

MrDarcy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve struggled for a decade to pin down my frustration with most product owners and it’s this at the root. They are often true imposters. At a startup they are shielded by CEO founders who beat the imposter syndrome drum, giving legitimacy to their incompetence.

But somehow nobody is calling them out for it. I suppose they quickly choose the side of the user, saying "you don't have to convince me, I'm just playing the user role here".

I've also heard this quite a lot. If they've never actually had to use the product or similar products in a professional setting, where their results mattered, then they aren't qualified to play the part of the user.

If the product has actual users, it's always better to talk to them directly, than to trust the opinions of someone who doesn't use the product to generate value every day.

Re: The Accountability Problem

#37

Post by afandian » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #21

"And like medieval scholars drawing elephants they’ve never seen, we make those interpretations through the lens of our own biases." Those images are quite amusing. They drew an elephant like a boar but with odd tusks. So the tusks were probably described correctly (semi-correctly) for the most part, but the size is totally wrong, which is weird. It's like ... "hey, I saw a thing with huge tusks but it was not bigger…

If you’re interested, Uli Westphal has made a serious study of elephant drawings and the chains of influence.

https://www.uliwestphal.de/elephas-anthropogenus/

Re: The Accountability Problem

#38

Post by nerdponx » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

alphazard wrote: post #29

Everyone who has worked in tech should reflect on the fact that it would be shocking to see a product manager produce a spec for the behavior of a feature, or a spreadsheet with discounted value analysis as in TFA. Those are both artifacts that aid in decision making, and especially aid in making the kind of decisions that product orgs have taken from other more qualified people at a company. Unfortunately, product m…

When somebody incompetent is hired to do a job, do you blame the incompetent person, or the person who hired the incompetent person?

Re: The Accountability Problem

#39

Post by jdlshore » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

csswizardry wrote: post #13

Complete side note: I’m on public wifi right now and the domain used to host the images in this article is, for some reason, blocked. But as the author (or whatever tool was used to generate the article) has taken time to write decent `alt` text, I can still get a good idea of what is going on. Kudos.

Thanks! (Author here.) I wrote the markup by hand, and did spend extra time on the “alt” tags. I’m glad someone noticed.

Re: The Accountability Problem

#40

Post by pols45 » Sun, Oct 19, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

alphazard wrote: post #34

MrDarcy wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve struggled for a decade to pin down my frustration with most product owners and it’s this at the root. They are often true imposters. At a startup they are shielded by CEO founders who beat the imposter syndrome drum, giving legitimacy to their incompetence.

A whole generation has come up thinking that it's normal for the direction of the product to be guided by the dumbest, least competent people in the room. Pretty much every tech company has, or aspires to have a product org. The best intuition pump I have for product managers is the analogy of hedge fund managers. There exist people who can predict the market, just like there exist people who can predict how a produc…

Competence is not magic.

There are unpredictable and complex problems that competence can't solve - see The Theory of Bounded Rationality.

So what happens when the "competent" can't solve what falls in their lap given constraints like resources/time/team etc?

They will either say we can't do it (someone else like Trump will put up his hand immediately and say but I can, I can do anything, Hilary is just a clown choose me). Or they will say we need to buy more time/resources/team etc.

The point here is - if they can't fend of the Opportunists and if they can't buy more time/resources etc by themselves but end up being reliant on some one that can easily be framed as incompetence and will be framed as such by Opportunists.

So you want to change the game, be honest about what "competent" people do when faced with unpredictability and complexity ie understand their limits. They generally exit the space. And others fill the space.