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More product, fewer product managers

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Re: More product, fewer product managers

#51

Post by quickthrower2 »

atoav wrote: post #45
cateye wrote: post #27

This article and many people attempting to analyze this topic (and many others) are missing a key element: "incentives"! Many developers are more passionate about technology itself – coding, solving complex technical problems, and creating efficient solutions. Their formal rewards (like promotions, bonuses, and recognition) are often tied to technical achievements. If a developer spends 40 hours on customer research,…

This isn't that hard. Just have your developers train people with your software. In every craft you learn the moment the rubber hits the road. A film director can watch the film in the editing room a thousand times, but the one first time watching it with a real audience will teach them more than those 1000 hours together. A carpenter can work away on a piece of furniture merrily all week long and be happy with thems…

“Incentives” if you do this you better make it pay so I never have to leave. If I have to leave to get a payrise then I am getting on the Omega Star team and slowing down their ISO timestamp roll out to get GraphQL on my CV, so I can hit levels.io and get that extra $100k TC. /s but Poes law applies.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#52

Post by koliber »

> Frankly, PMs are not the ones to handle UX, wireframing, tracking progress, organizing stand-ups, or being the sole authors of PRDs/specs, etc.

Who should be?

There are many schools of thought on this. In the end, it comes down to clearly defining who needs to be responsible for all the different things that go into defining, designing, and building a product.

Given the approach to product management in this article, what would the rest of the team look like?

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#53

Post by mewpmewp2 »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #26
bbarn wrote: post #6

As a developer, and a development manager, the best product managers I've worked with rarely got involved in the "how". Sure, they may generate epic-level tickets in your back log, but lower than that, they trust you and the project people to get things done. Problem is, the org needs to support that, and in most companies, the work that gets the most attention isn't visionary or growth focused, it's whatever is maki…

Product managers own the "Why?" and the "What?". Project managers own the "When?". Engineering managers own the "Who?". Engineers own the "How?". When people try treading on other patches, it always ends in disaster. That works both ways: engineers are lousy at the "Why?" and the "What?" because they think too much in terms of "How?"; and yes, product managers need to step away from the "How?" unless it's to clarify…

If this is the ownership and Engineers ask "How?", there's no one overall to connect the dots. For instance with this ownership dynamic product managers will come up with what and why, and engineers will come up with "how", but no one validates whether the whole thing is worth it considering the technical complexities involved. So scenarios where PMs come up with this and Engineers just ask "How?" there will be initiatives that take a lot of resources, while not giving enough in return.

There's no one to balance the complexity of building this vs the gains achieved.

I think best engineers would be people who also use the product and can give their own insights on this, as well as best PMs are someone who have good knowledge of the technical background and context.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#54

Post by koliber »

freitzkriesler2 wrote: post #3

Ha, what's the difference between a project manager and a product manager? Two letters and about $50k-100k. I've done both and it ends up being project management with a few extra steps. The extra steps being, "focusing on the market, solving customer problems, and being strategic. You'll hear the classic adage of, ” well project managers deal with the how to execute and product managers deal with the what to execute…

You shared an interesting perspective, but ruined the delivery with the last line.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#55

Post by heisenbit »

sunpazed wrote: post #33

I’ve been in product management for over 20 years, and I agree with most of what is said here. Ratios matter. CPOs end up empire building with an army of PMs. The organisation ends up with PMs owning a slice of the customer experience such as a single page, optimising CTRs on buttons, with no meaningful contribution to the product strategy or vision. It’s hard to be a Product Manager without owning a product.

Indeed. PMs are paired on a scrum master level. Then scrum master - due to the fact that they are "SCRUM MASTERS" and not developers focus also on PM type work. To make matters worse the "easily interchangeable" developers are coming from an outsourcing company. Now the development needs to be isolated from the customers with more management. It is a great way to increase the GDP.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#56

Post by fl7305 »

vwolf wrote: post #47
atoav wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't that hard. Just have your developers train people with your software. In every craft you learn the moment the rubber hits the road. A film director can watch the film in the editing room a thousand times, but the one first time watching it with a real audience will teach them more than those 1000 hours together. A carpenter can work away on a piece of furniture merrily all week long and be happy with thems…

I can attest to that. I had worked on a product for a couple of years and received feedback from our support team, but never seen how the product was used in real life. One time, we had a specific bug that the customers were complaining about, and no matter how they described it, we couldn't figure out what the problem was. That was until I went to one of the customer sites and saw how the users were interacting with…

Writing GUI applications, there's nothing as valuable as standing behind a user who tries to do something for the first time with my application.

Just seeing the moments of hesitation, how the mouse is moved while searching in menus, etc gives me a lot of information.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#57

Post by SushiHippie »

_giorgio_ wrote: post #36
ChilledTonic wrote: post #9

Barely relevant to the article, but this new trend of AI art as the main image of blog articles drives me absolutely crazy - if you don't have a clear main image in mind when you wrote the article, don't waste my bandwidth downloading a computers pipe dream. I'm all for AI art, it's an incredibly valuable tool - but if your using an AI piece as the only image on the page, it should be for a damn good reason, not just…

The most sad part is imagining the prompt that he used, and how hard he tried to add black, whites, women... respecting the politically correct numbers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1717jqk/chatgpt_da...

Yeah DALLE-3 has this in the system prompt.

> Diversify depictions of ALL images with people to include DESCENT and GENDER for EACH person using direct terms. Adjust only human descriptions.

> EXPLICITLY specify these attributes, not abstractly reference them. The attributes should be specified in a minimal way and should directly describe their physical form.

> Your choices should be grounded in reality. For example, all of a given OCCUPATION should not be the same gender or race. Additionally, focus on creating diverse, inclusive, and exploratory scenes via the properties you choose during rewrites. Make choices that may be insightful or unique sometimes.

> Use "various" or "diverse" ONLY IF the description refers to groups of more than 3 people. Do not change the number of people requested in the original description.

> Don't alter memes, fictional character origins, or unseen people. Maintain the original prompt's intent and prioritize quality.

> Do not create any imagery that would be offensive.

> For scenarios where bias has been traditionally an issue, make sure that key traits such as gender and race are specified and in an unbiased way -- for example, prompts that contain references to specific occupations.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#58

Post by Nextgrid »

0x1ceb00da wrote: post #23
signaru wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just AI art. Memes and unrelated stock image have also been used. It might be due to some SEO belief.

God I hate memes on medium pages.

"Medium" itself is generally a good heuristic for trash that isn't worth the time reading.

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#59

Post by PaulRobinson »

hehhehaha wrote: post #43
PaulRobinson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product managers own the "Why?" and the "What?". Project managers own the "When?". Engineering managers own the "Who?". Engineers own the "How?". When people try treading on other patches, it always ends in disaster. That works both ways: engineers are lousy at the "Why?" and the "What?" because they think too much in terms of "How?"; and yes, product managers need to step away from the "How?" unless it's to clarify…

Hard disagree, cross role context is critical for intuition on getting stuff done. A designer with no insight on engineering will create shitty designs that take forever to build, create patterns that arent reusable, etc. Engineers with no insight on product will not be able to balance the debt/product ratio properly. You can say that all of this gets sorted out with proper communication, but knowledge and intuition…

"Having context" isn't the same as "having ownership or accountability".

Of course there needs to be communication and context, but when engineers start to try and direct the "what" or the "why", it becomes as absurd as PMs trying to dictate the "how".

Re: More product, fewer product managers

#60

Post by PaulRobinson »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #53
PaulRobinson wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product managers own the "Why?" and the "What?". Project managers own the "When?". Engineering managers own the "Who?". Engineers own the "How?". When people try treading on other patches, it always ends in disaster. That works both ways: engineers are lousy at the "Why?" and the "What?" because they think too much in terms of "How?"; and yes, product managers need to step away from the "How?" unless it's to clarify…

If this is the ownership and Engineers ask "How?", there's no one overall to connect the dots. For instance with this ownership dynamic product managers will come up with what and why, and engineers will come up with "how", but no one validates whether the whole thing is worth it considering the technical complexities involved. So scenarios where PMs come up with this and Engineers just ask "How?" there will be initi…

The customer voice - represented by product managers - help join the dots.

It's a team sport, there needs to be communication, but there also needs to be clear areas of ownership.

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