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The product manager role is a mistake

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Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#321

Post by corethree »

I think a dedicated, well intentioned and PM who truly cares deeply about the product is important for a company.

The problem here is that the skill involved with being a PM are equivalent to janitorial jobs. Anyone can do it. Anyone can have intuition on how they think a product should work. This is not a high skill job. The work itself is not easy, just unskilled. The person in this role has to spend ALOT of time diving into the purpose of the product and thinking of new features... etc. Anyone can do it but not a lot of people are WILLING to do it.

What makes this role hard to find good people for is that it's hard to quantitatively measure how willing a PM guy actually is. Instead we end up measuring the persons political skills. How good is that person at making you THINK he cares about the product? And that is the metric and bar you need to be good at to land the PM job. Politics is a hard skill. It's hard to measure and it's hard to train for.

What happens is we try to measure skills in one dimension but politics and charisma can cover it all up. People can bullshit their way past everything. That's why algorithm questions are so pervasive in the industry. It's a way to cut through the bullshit specifically for software. It's a blurry metric but it is effective at removing a certain level of political bullshit.

For PMs you can't cut through the bullshit. Evaluation of the PM is directly through an API that is literally bullshit politics. The more charisma and the better you are playing politics the better you will be perceived at being a PM.

So what you get are a lot of shit PMs who are managing more politics than product. If the product doesn't do well, the PM is usually skilled enough in politics to redirect blame away from him. Both hiring for a PM and keeping a PM job is just a process of filtering for political skill.

A good example of a really good PM is Steve Jobs. But note his PM skill was orthogonal to actually keeping and holding the PM position. He got his own ass fired. He only came back because the company became desperate. This rarely happens in the real world where a fired PM will come back to his old job.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#322

Post by stcroixx »

kaibee wrote: post #254
alonsonic wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A product manager is expected to view things from a business point of view. To identify features for the product and help it succeed in the market. A project manager is in charge of planing, execution and governance of a project. They don’t define any of the goals or vision. Saying product is a large project is a big over simplification. If we go that route anything could be called a “large project”.

> in charge of planing, execution and governance of a project. They don’t define any of the goals or vision. This sounds like if you were trying to hire a race-car driver instead hired two people, and put one of them in charge of steering to the left and the other in charge of steering to the right.

The product manager decides which direction the car should be turned and the project manager turns the wheel.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#323

Post by ZephyrBlu »

remoquete wrote: post #12

More than a dozen years in tech have taught me that roles are simply ways of expressing organizational wishes. You want someone who thinks about something as a product? You open a PM position. You want a team lead? Here's an EM position. Job titles are elements of fiction that allow us to play that RPG called work under different angles. What you ultimately bring to work is your unique mix of talents and experience.…

Yes! I've really bought into this idea recently. Roles are about hiring someone to always think about things from that particular perspective.

Eng are capable of being PMs, but they will never think about everything from the PM point of view, because they are primarily engineers not PMs.

Something else I've realized in line with breaking the boundaries of roles is that usually, the most valuable aspects of a person's role are the responsibilities that are not explicitly defined. Hard to explain, but often people provide value in ways that are hard to describe and quantify.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#324

Post by alphazard »

The best products are made when a single highly competent person has complete control over the direction of the product. The problem is that's also how the worst products are made. Mediocre products are made through more democratic decision making processes.

If you think you can identity people with good taste, and incentive them properly to make the product better, and give them control to act on their taste, then you should do that. But you probably can't. One of the pieces is probably missing. Maybe you can't measure product quality very well. Or maybe you don't have good taste for people with good taste. Or maybe you don't have the authority to give someone control over the product.

The article gets at what I just called taste for good taste. It doesn't make sense to create a product manager role if you can't fill it with someone who has good taste concerning the product. Often, companies will get the PM roll wrong on multiple fronts: bad taste, and no ownership. At that point you've just hired on another voice adding noise to product discussions.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#325

Post by stcroixx »

alwa wrote: post #208
simmerup wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a company not make any money for 20 years that sounds insane

I don’t know if it applies to the situation the GP described, but profit != revenue. It seems to me, especially in the wild and woolly mom-n-pop end of the market, that there might be ample room for a company to sustainably put food on a certain number of employees’ family tables without much left over to characterize as profit.

I work at a 20 year old company about like this. We’re all comfortable, it’s really nice.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#326

Post by starky »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #232
starky wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I saw one of these types of articles on here it quickly became apparent that a lot of companies don't know the difference and call their project managers by the wrong name.

What is the difference then, between a project manager, product manager, a project owner and a product owner? Always thought they're approximately the same thing. Isn't any product you're working on a project too?

Product Manager: They are essentially the voice of the customer and upper management. They work on the product roadmap and determine the requirements for the product based on the needs that are determined by conversations with the stakeholders as well as other market research. In addition to this they also work on things like product pricing, release strategy, etc.

Project Manager: They ensure that all the tasks for a project get done on time. They make the gantt charts, work with teams to break it down into sections, keep track of budgets, manage risks, report on progress to stakeholders, etc.

I've never worked with a Product Owner since I understand it is mostly a software related position and that is not my area. From what I understand, they are an intermediary that sits between PdM and PjM.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#327

Post by elicksaur »

ipaddr wrote: post #127
elicksaur wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see as the difference between a developer and a SWE?

One is DevOps and one is a programmer

That didn’t really clarify for me, which is which? What is DevOps to you? (Seems to be different for everyone)

The wiki for “programmer” has “software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder” as interchangeable terms in the first sentence.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#328

Post by turnsout »

flappyeagle wrote: post #263
turnsout wrote: post #15

Don't hate the player, hate the game… PMs are just doing exactly what leadership has asked them to do. The real problem is unrealistic roadmaps filled with top-down strategic initiatives which are often made up by leadership with very little rigor—all in the pursuit of growth at any cost. The bad PM is an emergent property of that system.

A good PM pushes back on those initiative and fixes them

I’ve seen good PMs get told “just do this.” Managers don’t run the business.

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#329

Post by Spooky23 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #284
Spooky23 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t writing a treatise on every occupation and was being a little jocular. What I’ve witnessed over a 20 year career is that weak product people devolve to mediocre project managers. It’s easier to be a shitty project manager. Good project managers are gold. I worked with one who stood out a decade ago - his leadership at execution was such that a $350M, 20 month implementation, with collaboration with construct…

> his leadership at execution was such that a $350M, 20 month implementation, with collaboration with construction, tech, and external suppliers completed 45 minutes ahead of the original schedule This made me smile. I'm assuming you mean 45 days or something. Not that any number 'ahead of schedule' is inherently a bad thing (within reason), but my mind went to "Are there really companies out there tracking 2 year pr…

It's a little tongue in cheek. There were completion incentives around certain tasks, especially on the construction and physical side, being completed on a date. Date was defined as 4PM on the date, and there was a financial benefit to be early in many cases. The last physical task required to be completed and submitted was done at 3:15, thus "45 minutes early".

That said, some major elements were tracked to the minute. I wish I could share more, it's a great story!

Re: The product manager role is a mistake

#330

Post by j45 »

foota wrote: post #278
PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with product managers is that they wedge themselves between the business and the technical teams and then wield political power while doing very little. I'm currently trying desperately to get two different PM's to talk to each other so we can be consistent with permissions sets across two different projects. Both projects use the same set of API's. One of the PM's is basically incognito, the other has…

I wonder if part of the gap here is about whether a company is B2B or B2C. In my experience at a largely B2B company, the product managers are people that aren't necessarily technical, but have experience in the relevant domain and meet with customers to find out what they need and coordinate launches etc., with them. I don't know if the same role makes as much sense at a B2C company, so maybe people are B2Bs see the…

The issue too often is business analysts wanting to be product managers when technical analysts may enable to learn the role better.

TA’s will devour the BA’s because tech folks can learn business easier than the other way around.

Still, BA’s can learn the details and get more fluent in working with them.

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