61–70 of 105 posts
There is clearly a lack of boards/forums/websites dedicated to product managers. But what I miss the more is a website, when we can get valuable insights about best practices. On HN you can get super useful information about any stack/language/framework by reading the comments, but when you are a PM you have nowhere to get that kind of information
It’s because the PM role is largely bullshit.
General question I've been wondering tangentially related: Engineers: is working [edit: replacing 'under' with 'with' due to replies! good clarification, didn't mean under] with a non-technical product manager a dealbreaker for you? (Do you look to filter out places you'd work at while job searching?) Conversely, have you ever worked under a non-technical product manager you loved? Would you mind sharing details abou…
non-technical PMs are the best. They don't try to do things they can't, they take our word wrt complexity of implementing things and tradeoffs. And they are mostly women, which brings an extra layer of much-needed balance.
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I believe companies have more software engineers than PMs which invariably means there will be more software engineering vacancies than PM vacancies I also think the attrition rate for PMs are much much lower than that of Developers.
Yeah, I don't think PMs can really burn out / grow to hate your job as easily as developers do (unless you just have low performance). Also their skills don't transfer as easily. I see people with the title of "PM" (not product though) I work with making more than me who just click through the data visualizations/backend I made and turn that into reports to management... why would anybody give up that job when 1) the…
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Yeah, I don't think PMs can really burn out / grow to hate your job as easily as developers do (unless you just have low performance). Also their skills don't transfer as easily. I see people with the title of "PM" (not product though) I work with making more than me who just click through the data visualizations/backend I made and turn that into reports to management... why would anybody give up that job when 1) the…
>>>> It's also just a case where lots more people are qualified for this kind of job so it's not as hard to fill a position when the need arrises.>>>> Interesting. I think it's the opposite. Because PM culture differs from company to company, I feel like companies interview for PMs with a bias for how they expect their PMs to behave. This would be unlike Developers where companies are looking for folks proficient in…
But I also think it's ignorant to say that companies just want folks proficient in specific languages. That might be true for people without much experience but in most cases beyond that (which pay well) people are looking for deep technical understanding of a specific technology (e.g. deep learning) or a specific problem (e.g. scaling large web services).
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Yeah, I don't think PMs can really burn out / grow to hate your job as easily as developers do (unless you just have low performance). Also their skills don't transfer as easily. I see people with the title of "PM" (not product though) I work with making more than me who just click through the data visualizations/backend I made and turn that into reports to management... why would anybody give up that job when 1) the…
Because I see this sentiment (PMs have easy jobs and don't really do anything) a lot on HN, I want to offer an anecdotal counterpoint: I am a PM in San Francisco and most of the PMs I know personally work extremely hard and add a good deal of value to their companies. I realize that as a PM I am biased towards thinking I provide value/work hard, but I can safely say I have never heard of anyone working in a PM role a…
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Yeah, I don't think PMs can really burn out / grow to hate your job as easily as developers do (unless you just have low performance). Also their skills don't transfer as easily. I see people with the title of "PM" (not product though) I work with making more than me who just click through the data visualizations/backend I made and turn that into reports to management... why would anybody give up that job when 1) the…
Because I see this sentiment (PMs have easy jobs and don't really do anything) a lot on HN, I want to offer an anecdotal counterpoint: I am a PM in San Francisco and most of the PMs I know personally work extremely hard and add a good deal of value to their companies. I realize that as a PM I am biased towards thinking I provide value/work hard, but I can safely say I have never heard of anyone working in a PM role a…
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A couple of sites that have been useful to me, in no particular order (not affiliated w/ any): - productmanagerhq.com - productschool.com - mindtheproduct.com - roadmap.com - departmentofproduct.com
productmanagerhq.com has been a let down for me. Its mostly people sharing articles and tool recommendations. No real or deep discussion. No one points flaws in others thinking/products. I was very disappointed with the community. That said, the article recommendation in weekly newsletter are good .
Cargo culting gets you way further in most careers than making good decisions. Unless you're high enough up in your company to seriously shape it's future, it's usually +EV to just follow the herd and to be seen doing it, loudly, and often. Hence all the shitty Medium articles about how great every single tool/ideology/framework/technique is.
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>>>> It's also just a case where lots more people are qualified for this kind of job so it's not as hard to fill a position when the need arrises.>>>> Interesting. I think it's the opposite. Because PM culture differs from company to company, I feel like companies interview for PMs with a bias for how they expect their PMs to behave. This would be unlike Developers where companies are looking for folks proficient in…
That's fair, I do acknowledge that the PM role varies greatly between companies (and often within companies). For example at my company PMs would never make a UI mockup, they would basically be the bridge between designers, management, customers, and engineers when it comes to UI. But if you aren't requiring your PMs to be technical, I mean the sheer amount of people qualified to do that job (even with stipulations s…
Fair Point. For experienced hires, companies want technical knowledge of a technology/domain
>>>> But if you aren't requiring your PMs to be technical, I mean the sheer amount of people qualified to do that job (even with stipulations such as "knows design")>>>
Well, for experienced hires too, domain specific knowledge is also relevant for PMs.
There is clearly a lack of boards/forums/websites dedicated to product managers. But what I miss the more is a website, when we can get valuable insights about best practices. On HN you can get super useful information about any stack/language/framework by reading the comments, but when you are a PM you have nowhere to get that kind of information
The challenge in building such a community is that PM is a highly sought after job in the tech sector, so any forum or website built around PM discussion is inevitably going to turn into something like Medium, which today is a list of poorly written thought pieces by (mostly) amateurs.