The product manager role is a mistake

Those PMs in the PMO knew their shit, they were realistic, they understood different strategies, they handled managing up and down, and ensuring everyone knew what they had to do.

I wrote a linkedin review for my favorite PM and it's as follows:

When I first met Rajitha, she was in the process of managing a company wide Windows 7 to 10 upgrade. As it turns out I was one of the last holdouts and was badly overdue. She was incessant! I hated it!. Finally, I gave into her demands and as these things go, I was pleasantly surprised how smoothly it went.

Fast forward a few months and Rajitha was tasked to work along side myself and others on several complex tech merger/acquisition projects. Moving parts, moving people, the whole thing was a whirlwind held down by a few important people on the team, including her. My initial resentment was replaced with a new deeply held respect for her capabilities and skillset. She was amazingly diligent and focused, friendly and compassionate.

If you're get a chance to work with Rajitha, count yourself among the lucky few!

Sorry Rajitha, this recommendation is many years overdue. I was cleaning out my filing cabinet and found a stack of old Church & Dwight papers. A print out of "How I learned to stop worrying and love Direct To Consumer". A "Magneto", not "Magento" project cover, and a handwritten note -- left on my desk -- from you to make sure I followed up a task that was in my queue".

Used to be we had two or three people responsible for owning the product design. Coherence of design, despite the name, doesn’t come from a single mind. It comes from a mind that is challenged at every turn to be better. I had a friend in college who had a love-hate relationship with Stephen King. He was a fan, but lamented the fact that King refuses to have an editor. “Great beginnings, terrible endings,” was how my friend described his books. And “he needs an editor, even if he doesn’t want one.” And repeated it at the end of each book he read. Which is how we end up with King saying the Movie Ending for The Mist was better than his ending. Nobody to push back. Nobody invested with the power to call him on his bullshit.

We used to have companies with a leader of engineering that insisted on what success would look like, a leader of quality that insisted on what corners we could not cut, and a leader of development that insisted on how we were going to get there. Now we have a product owner trying to be all three and doing a shitty job at two of them. If you’re lucky.

In traditional Kanban, everyone has a veto, a strong cultural drive not to use that veto unless it’s necessary, but as soon as it’s necessary. In Scrum the illusion of adaptability is an opiate for the masses. Agile theater for a process that has become almost entirely and practically Lean. If you think you’re doing Agile when you’re doing Lean, you’re gonna have a bad time.

What’s not great is customers arguing with engineers about which features to implement first or whether their bug report ought to have been backlogged. This is where a strong product role is essential.

For example, look at the scope and definition of a "program manager" from Microsoft or the US DoD in the 1980s, 1990s+, as well as literature describing the role of a program manager and the discipline from that time.