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B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
61–70 of 148 posts
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#62This article is pretty wrong, but look at the upvotes. It obviously speaks to a lot of people. I think it says more about the disconnect between dev and product, than the actual sins of product people.
Agreed and that hacker news readers may not be any different than the average news consumer, going on title and no content when forming an opinion.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#63This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly. Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B st…
Great headline though
B2B startups stop innovating the day you give powers to developers (video)
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#64As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably, you can immediately assume the author has no idea what they’re talking about. Convenient this article did that early on, saves everyone a lot of time.
> As soon as an article states you can use “product manager” and “project manager” interchangeably This is quite common. Lots of ex-project managers are now called product managers or scrum masters. But they're actually project managers.
That would fall into the realm of product owner, who are meant to keep things in-line with committed timelines and keep teams working on outputs, different from product managers as they have significantly less headache and scope of responsibility.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I agree that this is poorly written (I wrote it). The point of the article is not that companies shouldnt have PM, but that you shouldnt make them owner of the innovation in a B2B context. Of course if you start with the assumption of "Good PMs" it will work, but you will rarely find these "good PMs"
In this whole article the word "problem" is only written once, and it's in the line "the problem with product managers is". Given you don't understand that the core pillar of the product manager role is to be the owner of the problem space, I'm not sure how qualified you are to comment on how valuable our role is or isn't. Discovery isn't about decided what does or doesn't get built, it's about discovering what the r…
Sorry if you took it personally or you think this is a rant. This is clearly not the case, I can repeat it, PM have a lot of value, but there is one specific area that we shouldn't give them control over.
It doesnt mean they are bad PM or good PM, innovation requires just fundamentally opposed skills to the standard product management ones that we see in books.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#66Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
>> customer
As we all know from agile it's impossible for a customer to know what they want and it's the programmers job to talk to them to figure it out anyway
>> market
As Heynren Grufford said: the market can want a faster horse for longer than you can be where the puck will be
So they focus on what they think they can control.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#67Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
I've seen "product" done badly at multiple companies. I've still not seen it done very well. I think the problem is structural. Of all the areas of software development process that get cargo culted without careful consideration of actual effect, product management is the worst (with "scrum" a close second!) Someone in management decides that "we need to be product led" and appoints a product manager or owner. They t…
It's just hard in general. So it will feel messy from the inside.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#68This is a poorly written article that is all over the place. It’s evident the author had a horrible experience with a PM. Their description of a PM is a description of a PM who’s doing their job poorly. Qualitative research at any company is critical and poor qual research (interviewing the wrong people, asking the wrong types of questions, etc) will yield poor insights as is the case here. Any PM working at a B2B st…
Presenting a dichotomy of "Developers aren't social and product managers are" says a lot more between the lines about the author than the actual words advance any argument.
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Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#69Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
>"you just need to hire the /good/ PMs"
No, you need to hire good EMs to provide checks and balances. Any system without checks and balances will go off the rails at any moderate scale no matter what you do.
Re: B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
#70Why has every product person I've worked with been obsessed with controlling teams and communication rather than obsessing over the customer and the market? Friends say the same thing too. It makes me roll my eyes whenever someone retorts "you just need to hire the /good/ PMs" Even my worst sales/tech colleagues, I've never had as much conflict and annoyance as with product people
I’ve seen this in dealing with Microsoft. Product Managers at these companies all have a type A personality in general. If you want excessive politics and everyone fighting and being a dumb ass it’s the product managers at big companies. I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way. At the larger companies the people who spend all their time fighting for power seem to be product manag…
> I’m not sure if product managers at small companies and startups act this way.
Ten years of experience at various startups, and it is absolutely this way.